Mrthfx

Companies use headers like

// Copyright 2011 The Go Authors.

But countless projects with a single maintainer have

// Copyright 2011 John Smith

even though they have hundreds of contributors, all of whom own their contributions.

Is this ok to only include the owner in the header?

Thanks

As far as I am aware, all FLOSS licenses that deal with copyright notices only require the preservation of notices that exist. Each author had the opportunity to add their own name to header when they made their contribution. If they chose not to do so, there is no existing notice from that author to preserve. There is never (as far as I know) any requirement to proactively add a notice that an author chose not to include.

Not having a copyright notice for some copyright holder is not inherently legally problematic, either, since copyright notices have virtually no legal function. An overwhelming majority of nations have ratified the Berne Convention, which requires that copyright rights are automatically granted at the time of a work's creation, irrespective of any copyright notice on the work.

If someone removes existing copyright notices from another author, then that's obviously not allowed by the license (and may be illegal even without license terms that prohibit it, per statutes like 17 USC §1202).

Legal? Who knows? If you work for a place that has an open-source compliance lawyer, ask them.

Still: open source licenses often suggest what to do with existing copyright notices. For example, the MIT license says, emphasis mine.

Copyright year copyright holder

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

It's clear, under this license, that the copyright notice on the FOSS you used should be included unchanged on the copies you distribute. If you did a substantial amount of work you could add another copyright line.

Other licenses offer similar requirements.

Regardless of whether it's legal (it should be, but ask a lawyer), as a maintainer I find it inappropriate. For software that has a single primary author and many contributors of small patches, an appropriate copyright notice looks like:

Copyright ©2019 [author's name], et. al.

for et alia, literally "and others".

For a work with multiple major authors (and it's not clear to me the point at which this should change), but with no formal organization holding copyright, a more appropriate version might be:

Copyright ©2019 the authors of [project name]

However, you might want to run this by a lawyer, since it's not entirely traditional/conventional.

If you do end up with a formal organization that will hold copyright to most of the work, but don't want to impose FSF-style copyright assignment, an appropriate notice would be:

Copyright ©2019 [The Organization], et. al.