Update LICENSE to include full text of Apache license

[Manishearth]

It's common to have the full license in the repo so that various tooling can correctly recognize it.

[webknjaz]

Never change somebody else's copyright lines. Especially, not to pretend that the content got created this year. It's not how it works. This could probably go to the notice file, I suppose. But it might be good to have a discussion first.

[Manishearth]

I mean, this isn't me changing it, this is me proposing a change, you are welcome to reject it but I don't think I'm in the wrong for proposing it and it feels rather weird to get such a response to a PR.

I reset the year to 2016, apologies for not mentioning that in the PR body. I've noticed most open source projects like to keep the year up to date and haven't found any that dislike that, so I felt I could just do that in passing. But I definitely should have mentioned it.

[webknjaz]

This has nothing to do with liking the year updates but with misunderstanding how copyright works.

1. Copyright is granted to content/text authors automatically upon creation. This happens regardless of whether the "copyright" word, the "©" symbol or the year is written down anywhere. Those copyright lines only exist as a communication tool. They don't have any legal power, nor are they required. It's just convenient so people don't have to dig into history to figure out when copyright came into being.
2. That said, the copyright year is the first content creation year, which is why it's correct to never change it to something else. Sometimes, people like to keep ranges of years because the content is updated which is technically new content creation in some parts of the existing ones. And sometimes, people like to be explicit and enumerate each year, comma-separated. These all would be correct.
3. Updating the years is not very useful and takes up a lot of time for no reason, which is why more people opt for not having them recorded. The Linux Foundation recommends exactly that: https://hynek.me/til/copyright-years/. I personally prefer just having that first year.
4. Sometimes, there are several contributors to projects or individual files, and so they add their copyright lines for the credit presence. They'll have different years. Nobody else's copyright lines are not allowed to be updated because that would turn them into a lie. If one would like to update their line, they should do it themselves or give someone a permission.

IANAL so there might be more nuance to it in some jurisdictions. But the general gist is this.

The copyright problem has been solved.

[webknjaz]

This should still mention the contributors.

[Manishearth]

oh, I could swear I copy pasted that over correctly, perhaps it got truncated

[webknjaz]

I realized that this should actually be moved elsewhere: #1017 (comment)

[Manishearth]

Okay, I see where you're coming from. I disagree that this comes from my misunderstanding of copyright: I know these things, I was just following common practice, and I already apologized for not mentioning that the year had changed in the PR.

It is extremely common for codebases that mention a year (which, I agree, isn't best practice!) to update the year. In the past when I've done license fixes like this sometimes folks have asked me to fix the year while I'm at it. It's not incorrect to update the year to a new year, the year is not super load bearing when it comes to this since as you say in point 1, the year is implicitly a property of the code regardless of what the codebase says.

[webknjaz]

FYI this is supposed to be boilerplate for the notice. The actual notice would go to a file called NOTICE.