Source code authorship attribution comments in PSyclone

[nmnobre]

Hi everyone!

[sergisiso]

The cons are that they are cumbersome to maintain, they are not always accurate (e.g forgotten updates, copy/paste between files, ... ) and are not legally required for someone to be recognized as a copyright holder (the actual file history is).
The pros are that BSD-3 requires attribution, so it makes it easier for people who want to take/fork a single file or part of the project to keep the attribution without doing extra work.

An alternative to satisfy pros without cons would be to add a AUTHORS global file and on each file say:

# Part of the PSyclone Project, released under the BSD 3-Clause License.
# See LICENSE or go to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stfc/PSyclone/master/LICENSE for license
# information. See AUTHORS or go to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stfc/PSyclone/master/AUTHORS
# for authorship information.

This is what some projects like LLVM do.

[nmnobre]

STFC is the sole copyright holder according to the license text, individuals are only "contributors" but hold no copyright.
I would much prefer a single list of authors in the root of the repo like you suggest.

[sergisiso]

This is probably not the case whatever the license text says (https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11194/can-a-cla-be-agreed-to-implicitly-like-a-license). In general the copyright is owned by the person/institution who create those lines unless a CLA is signed. However, this doesn't matter for BSD-3 open-source license because the rights are the same either way.