update licence

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

Add BSD3 licence.

[Matt Shin (matthewrmshin)]

Do we still need the old licence file (COPYRIGHT.txt)?

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

Do we still need the old licence file (COPYRIGHT.txt)?

• It appears redundant and I was going to discuss with you and others.
• Also, we were asked to add Crown copyright statement in all necessary files. I believe some of the Fortran utils were copied from elsewhere - those codes should not have the crown copyrights. Shall we leave this part as they are?

[Matt Shin (matthewrmshin)]

• Also, we were asked to add Crown copyright statement in all necessary files. I believe some of the Fortran utils were copied from elsewhere - those codes should not have the crown copyrights. Shall we leave this part as they are?

Yes, I believe they should be left as-is. If they have different licences, we should include those in separate licence files. As an example, in FCM's source tree, we have a doc linked from its README to acknowledge work that are simply bundled into the project.
https://github.com/metomi/fcm#acknowledgement-for-non-fcm-work

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

Most codes contain reference to COPYRIGHT.txt file in the following forms

a)

!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
! (C) Crown copyright Met Office. All rights reserved.
!     Refer to COPYRIGHT.txt of this distribution for details.
!-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

b)

! *****************************COPYRIGHT*******************************
! (c) CROWN COPYRIGHT, Met Office, All Rights Reserved.
! Please refer to Copyright file in top level GCOM directory
!                 for further details
! *****************************COPYRIGHT*******************************

• The second line should be removed form every file (should not be a problem assuming that is consistent across files) if we decide to remove the COPYRIGHT.txt from the distribution.
• We need to include copyright statement in all (our) yaml files, shell/Python scripts, Markdown, etc
• Remove Apache 2.0 statement from all CMakeLists.txt

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

Matt Shin (@matthewrmshin) Getting my head around the legal bit. Perhaps the copyright notice is a requirement for bsd3. I see https://github.com/metomi/fab have both. Perhaps its better to keep the Copyright file - what do you think?

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

Michael Cooke (@mikecooke77) I've attempted to tidy the varfields table, but that definitely needs updating in a separate PR.

[Matt Shin (matthewrmshin)]

Matt Shin (@matthewrmshin) Getting my head around the legal bit. Perhaps the copyright notice is a requirement for bsd3. I see https://github.com/metomi/fab have both. Perhaps its better to keep the Copyright file - what do you think?

I don't think so. We just need a single COPYING, LICENSE or LICENSE.md file. COPYRIGHT.txt was an artifact of our old Met Office proprietary licence. GitHub Help has a few pages about licensing, e.g.: https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-project-for-healthy-contributions/adding-a-license-to-a-repository

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

Matt Shin (@matthewrmshin) Getting my head around the legal bit. Perhaps the copyright notice is a requirement for bsd3. I see https://github.com/metomi/fab have both. Perhaps its better to keep the Copyright file - what do you think?

I don't think so. We just need a single COPYING, LICENSE or LICENSE.md file. COPYRIGHT.txt was an artifact of our old Met Office proprietary licence. GitHub Help has a few pages about licensing, e.g.: https://docs.github.com/en/communities/setting-up-your-project-for-healthy-contributions/adding-a-license-to-a-repository

Done!

[Matt Shin (matthewrmshin)]

Looks good. The only comment I have is the copyright years. Should we have a consistent year range in each file? Or should we just remove the year?

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

I thought about that, but then realised the date can be left as date of first publication in order to avoid any ownership conflicts in the future (again different countries have different set of rules to make things more complicated).

We can remove the year stamp altogether though. Would you prefer this instead?

[Matt Shin (matthewrmshin)]

Let's leave the year stamp for now.

[mo-glenngreed]

Having browsed the code and the changes, I am happy with the licence and the headers in the files.

[Michael Cooke (mikecooke77)]

Thanks for adding the code and the associated script. Please add the ready to merge flag and I'll merge the code.

[Yaswant Pradhan (yaswant)]

Michael Cooke (@mikecooke77) I think you have pushed another PR very recently for this conflict? Can you comment?

Ignore that, I see now you have done a merge develop.