[Onboarding checklist] clarify requirements around copyright notice

[tobie]

The onboarding checklist contains the following item:

Update legal copyright notice on project website and github

It would be great to clarify the following:

For the website:

• What does the copyright notice have to say precisely?
• May the website's copyright notice also include a more vague/broad term such as "the Foo open source project" or "Contributors of Foo"?
• Is a mention such as "Portions of this site originally © 2015-2017 John Doe" required?

For the LICENSEs and READMEs:

• Does it need to be the foundation's copyright only?
• Can it be something along the lines of the "Contributors of Foo"?
• Can it be both?
• Is a mention such as "Portions of the code base © 2015-2017 John Doe" required?

For source code files:

• Should existing copyright notices be kept?
• Should they all be modified upfront to apply the copyright notice of the license (see above)?
• Should they reflect the actual contributors to that source page?
• Should they be removed altogether?

I understand that the above may differ depending on what license the project is under, or whether the project ues a CLA, DCO, or nothing (see openjs-foundation/cross-project-council#387 on that topic). Regardless, I think having those guidelines somewhere would be helpful.

[brianwarner]

Assigning myself, I'll help get these answers for you, Tobie.

[jorydotcom]

@brianwarner let's make sure we capture these answers somewhere for documentation purposes, perhaps on the onboarding repo?

[brianwarner]

Generally speaking, we recommend something like "Copyright Contributors to the [projectname]" as opposed to "Copyright [foundationname]".

[brianwarner]

I would also follow up to this and say - never remove existing copyright notices. While this line applies to all project contributors going forward, it doesn't replace notices which are already there (for a variety of reasons, where one is that it could be required by the license).

[tobie]

never remove existing copyright notices

That’s just content in licenses and headers right? Nor for the website itself?