Description
In #43498, the copyright notice reading "Copyright (c) 2015 The Rust Project
Developers" was stripped from the MIT license. This was done because there is no legal entity named "The Rust Project Developers" holding the copyright. However, this implies that groups who aren't legal entities don't deserve attribution, which I don't think is true. Also, this might be a license violation, since most rust developers never agreed to the removal. Therefore, I'd like to propose adding the following copyright notice:
Copyright <year> various Rust Project
Developers
This could also be interpreted as a violation of the license of pre-2015 code, as it's not exactly the copyright notice required, but that would also mean that changing the year is a license violation, yet most projects keep the year up-to-date.
Activity
njhanley commentedon Apr 7, 2023
This seems like a big issue. Without a copyright notice in LICENSE-MIT, there is no clear way to comply with the one condition of the license:
This comment implies attribution isn't required at all.
Related: #63232
SvizelPritula commentedon Apr 7, 2023
I'm not a lawyer, but I can't imagine a judge interpreting this any other way than that no copyright notice is required, just the license text itself.
aloisklink commentedon Jul 27, 2023
It would be nice for there to at least be something in the
LICENSE-MIT
file, even if it just says: "Please see the COPYRIGHT file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at http://rust-lang.org/COPYRIGHT". Not seeing a copyright notice in the MIT license is pretty confusing, until you find #43498 (comment)workingjubilee commentedon Feb 14, 2025
see https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/COPYRIGHT