Zen project forks Zig, relicenses, and “moves” original license to separate file

Re:Zen project forks Zig, relicenses, and “moves” original l... by stock_toaster on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:47PM (#21717530)

Yeah, the MIT license is small/short enough that it is probably best practice to just slap it onto the top of every file. A single file LICENSE is instructive, but shouldn't be the only place you put a license, or it is apt to be fiddled around with and/or make it unclear which parts of the source are under which license, should the project be incorporated into something downstream.

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Re:Zen project forks Zig, relicenses, and “moves” original l... by markslicker on Thursday December 05, 2019 @08:51PM (#21718620)

A copyright notice could be a single line in a source file, just mentioning the authors and the license that applies.

It gets a bit complicated when you have many authors all contributing to a github repo. Some projects require the authors to sign off so that the copyright is assigned to a single entity, that makes relicensing easy. With an open source project like Zig it might be complicated to relicense since you have many contributors.

It seems that Zig should maintain a contributors file since they have chosen the joint copyright model with the MIT license. They could then refer to that in a copyright notice, which could be a single line per file.

On the Zen side however there seems to be a gross misunderstanding of copyright. Just because you make some changes to a source file (or no changes at all) does not allow you to completely reasign the copyright to yourself.

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