Proposal: Simplify copyright headers and author tags

[drewnoakes]

Feedback please!

In the .NET library we removed the long-form copyright header and replaced it with a shorter one. I'd like to propose doing the same thing in the Java repo.

Copyright Banners

Before

/*
 * Copyright 2002-2019 Drew Noakes and contributors
 *
 *    Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 *    you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 *    You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *        http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 *    Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 *    distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 *    WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 *    See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 *    limitations under the License.
 *
 * More information about this project is available at:
 *
 *    https://drewnoakes.com/code/exif/
 *    https://github.com/drewnoakes/metadata-extractor
 */

After

// Copyright (c) Drew Noakes and contributors. All Rights Reserved. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE in the project root for license information.

Up sides:

• Less stuff to look at while editing code (depending upon your IDE)
• No need to update the date range every year

We don't need the project URLs in every file. There's a README with this information and more. If anyone is in doubt as to where a single file came from, the package name should be enough to find it easily online these days.

---

Authorships

The thing that makes me happiest about the metadata extractor projects is the huge amount of community involvement. I totally want to give credit to everyone who contributes, no matter the size of contribution.

I don't think the current @author Javadoc tags do a good job of attributing contributions. Many files are added without authors, and many files are updated without attributing these contributions to their authors in the Javadoc.

The @author annotation seems a bit dated nowadays. Git and GitHub do a great job of capturing who contributed what code, both line-by-line and via linked issues/PRs. I feel like the @author tags add no value and are potentially misleading, so I am considering removing them. Does anyone have any reservations about that? The same is true of <author> tags in the .NET implementation.

I would like to hear your feedback on all of the above. Thanks!

[softdevca]

I suggest a revised format for the first line to make it clear where the file is from, as files get copied and pasted the universe:

// Copyright (c) Drew Noakes and contributors. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See github.com/drewnoakes/metadata-extractor/LICENSE

"All rights reserved" is not required.

I agree the functionality of the @author tags is better served with version control.

[nosnhojbob]

So far, I've only made one contribution and I threw in the @author just out of habit. No issues from me if the annotation is stripped out in favor of Git history.

[drewnoakes]

I suggest a revised format for the first line to make it clear where the file is from, as files get copied and pasted the universe:

// Copyright (c) Drew Noakes and contributors. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See github.com/drewnoakes/metadata-extractor/LICENSE

How about using SPDX:

// Copyright (c) Drew Noakes and contributors. Licensed under Apache-2.0 (https://github.com/drewnoakes/metadata-extractor/LICENSE)

"All rights reserved" is not required.

Great!

I agree the functionality of the @author tags is better served with version control.

Thanks, and I haven't heard any other complaints. I am leaning towards making this change.