Does anyone know who or what the legal entity "The Go Authors" is/are?
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It's a shorthand referring to all authors in the same way as "The Android Open Source Project". Their open source projects don't use copyright assignment so there are many copyright owners.
cla.developers.google.com/about/google-i is what they have individuals sign to contribute to any projects.
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I assume that, but has this actually been validated via a lawyer or the courts? Because if I copy the file + LICENSE, it's not clear who the copyright owner is.
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There's no requirement to provide a list of the copyright owners. The licenses require you preserve the copyright notices and the authors have chosen to refer to themselves as "The Go Authors" or "The Android Open Source Project" so you just have to preserve the notice as is.
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The copyright statement is different than the license and different laws apply.
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In this case the individual files refer to an actual notice elsewhere instead of having a bunch of them for each file. They distribute each notice variation with software like Android. If a project has 10 files different variations of the notice, they actually ship 10 of them.
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P.s. IMO each file needs to be properly tagged individually. No implicit references to external files.
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They always approach it by gathering up all the notices into a central file applying to the whole project and distributing that with every form of the software so they don't need to worry about code being moved between files, based on other files, etc. They do over-compliance.
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It's annoying to fully comply with the licenses as written and they do what they do with the generic notices referring to the group of authors simply to make their life easier. If they had 200 variations of authors/dates, they'd have to ship 200 notices in a user-facing UI too.
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"provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies" is actually quite annoying if there are 100 variations of the notice throughout the project. They actually comply with it to the letter and their lawyers clearly don't think it would be correct to merge the notices.