Ticket #996 (closed task: fixed)

We decided not to derive the authors list from git, since it cannot be accurate in some cases. Instead, we will manually maintain the authors for each source file of ImageJ2 and ImgLib. For those files missing an authors list, though, we may add a primary author as provided by the git history.

For uniformly switching to BSD-2 and updating the year range, I will try to use the  license-maven-plugin, or write a script if that is infeasible for some reason.

For deciding on the correct copyright entity, I have asked the UW administrative legal team for their advice, and am waiting to hear back.

For the copyright holders in the header, after consulting the UW administrative legal team, we decided to use "Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin-Madison" for the LOCI team since that is the legal copyright holder.

So the complete  ImageJ2 copyright blurb is currently:

Copyright (C) 2009 - 2012 Board of Regents of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Max Planck
Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.

For the  ImgLib copyright holders, there are several other institutions involved. Further, some copyright holders contributed work on their personal time, and thus retain personal copyright. As such, we decided to use the complete list of individual authors as listed by git shortlog -ns, ordered by number of commits:

Copyright (C) 2009 - 2012 Stephan Preibisch, Stephan Saalfeld, Tobias
Pietzsch, Albert Cardona, Barry DeZonia, Curtis Rueden, Lee Kamentsky, Larry
Lindsey, Johannes Schindelin, Christian Dietz, Grant Harris, Jean-Yves
Tinevez, Steffen Jaensch, Mark Longair, Nick Perry, and Jan Funke.

For  SCIFIO and Bio-Formats, the current proposal is:

Copyright (C) 2005-2012, Board of Regents of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, Glencoe Software, Inc., and University of Dundee.

But the OME team is still internally discussing whether this blurb should be stamped across all SCIFIO and Bio-Formats source files, or whether each file should have its own custom tailored (and manually maintained) copyright header. (See also the  OME FAQ's question on copyrights.)

On the technical side: to stamp and maintain the headers and LICENSE.txt files, we decided to use  license-maven-plugin for all our projects, including ImageJ2 and ImgLib.

Copyright headers for ImageJ were updated in 60b1adb03fb5fafc5e2c1143f20f8a65aff89831, e7d70fb96b2c9c5164a5e0147084e85b49a85d12 and d87c3a5cb2f2d33423d4b540add3d57bf2e1369a. Headers for ImgLib were updated in  da77c2 and  c08b80. ImgLib LICENSE.txt files were updated in  821c56. Helper scripts for both ImageJ2 and ImgLib were added in 9bf79421216e810f1106c951cb9fae835e0f7ea0 and 59fde5b8035a94645a1f35f6157b406018d86ac5.

In the future, updating copyright headers (e.g., to update the range of years, or change the copyright holders) is as easy as executing the "mvn license:update-file-header" command.

The license-maven-plugin configuration was  added to the SciJava common POM as well as the ImageJ and ImgLib base POMs, which makes it easier to use license-maven-plugin with all SciJava-based software.

There was one bug in license-maven-plugin, which was  reported and fixed in the latest development version. I made an intermediate release of the plugin,  1.1-20120328, and  updated pom-scijava to use it for the time being, until 1.1 is officially released.

LICENSE.txt files for ImageJ2 were added in ae1449e2b14f25af07710e279164819b61a6217b.

In summary, items 1 through 4 are now complete. Item 5 is waiting on further discussion amongst the involved copyright holders. Ticket #100 will continue to remain open to track the status of SCIFIO/Bio-Formats. This ticket, however, is closed, since the headers for ImageJ2 and ImgLib have been standardized.