Remove License/Copyright header lines from *all* files about visit HOT 12 CLOSED

After some off-line discussion, we've converged on the following

• Remove all copyright verbiage from all source headers (.C, .h, CMake, shell, python, etc.)
• In the top-level COPYRIGHT file, include verbiage to the effect...
  Copyrights and patents in the VisIt project are retained by contributors.
  No copyright assignment is required to contribute to VisIt.
• The top-level COPYRIGHT file will be the only one requiring yearly update to incriment the date range.

from visit.

FYI, the guidance we are talking about is on this page.

The lack of details on a requirement to have details at the top of source files is what means you can remove it. Note that Spack chooses to have a short notice at the top of some files. I believe that cardioid choose to go with SPDX identifiers (details at the bottom of the page)

from visit.

I generally think it is clearer to use a short header that states the copyright and license -- that's what ours do. It's basically just "copyright LLNS and the Spack developers" and "SPDX-License-Identifier: (Apache-2.0 OR MIT)":

# Copyright 2013-2018 Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC and other
# Spack Project Developers. See the top-level COPYRIGHT file for details.
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: (Apache-2.0 OR MIT)

from visit.

Spack’s approach doesn’t solve the “update the copyright date each year” problem. But you can choose to only have the comment at the top of files that are deemed important enough.

from visit.

Well, I wanted to get away from updating 7,000+ source files every 365 days. If that isn't going to be possible...I am not sure I care about shrinking 50 line header down to 2.

from visit.

It’s possible / technically allowable... just maybe not what you want. SCR has decided to remove in-code copyright comments all together. Visit has a broader reach and your team may be more concerned with people looking at the source files and copying.

from visit.

FWIW, the Rust project, which we based the Spack headers on, has since made some changes to remove their headers:

• rust-lang/rust-clippy#3645
• rust-lang/rust#43498

Maybe we should remove them in Spack, too. It's definitely more maintainable.

from visit.

Well, so I guess the true problem is the constantly change current year in the headers. If we could adjust text, as rust team discussed, so that date/years were included in only a minimal set of places, then I would welcome that.

For example, if we could change header to something like...

Copyright 2000-Present Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. and other VisIt project developers.
For present year and additional details, see the top-level COPYRIGHT file.

from visit.

@markcmiller86 if thats acceptable, that looks great.

from visit.

@tgamblin @gonsie...who should we seek further guidance from regarding this?

from visit.

I put a question in to IPO and legal. I'm genuinely curious.

from visit.

Ok, we met with lab legal to review these actions and some other questions. Slight modification to above...instead of removing copyright verbiage of any kind from headers, we will replace existing verbiage with a short statement for the reader to find copyright info at the top-level COPYRIGHT file. Other steps remain the same.

from visit.