Copyright notice is missing

[ben-sag]

For users of Jackson who are trying to obey the license obligations it's a bit of a pain that unlike most opensource projects the copyright notice is not filled out.

e.g. the file https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-modules-base/blob/2.18/LICENSE contains instruction that projects like yous which use Apache need to replace the "Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]" with your text. Since this was not done it's a bit hard for user who are trying to do the right thing (or have automated pipelines for opensource license scanning). As mentioned at https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson/wiki/FAQ there's no need for it to be in individual source files, but (as implied by that page) it ought to be somewhere, ideally somewhere like the pom.xml or META-INF/ inside the binary jar people are downloading.

Maybe it's not obvious which contributor(s) to mention, but putting something is better than nothing (contributors can always add themselves to the list if they care), since at the moment end-users of Jackson are forced to guess or give up on jackson, or disobey Apache's license, all of which are a bit sad.

Another easy option for you would be to bootstrap the list of contributors with a dump of the GitHub committer users. Maybe this part is best discussed on your dev mailing list... but I think we need this issue as well to track the user-facing part of actually adding a copyright. I note that on your javadoc page e.g. https://javadoc.io/doc/com.fasterxml.jackson.core/jackson-databind/2.1.1/overview-summary.html you've declared that the copyright belongs to FasterXML, so specifying that would be another option.

[cowtowncoder]

Quick note: you can see actual contributors from ./release-notes/CREDITS-2.x for most if not all Jackson components. For many/most components that list would be impractical to include in LICENSE file.
I also don't think that list from Github would be any more practical, due to number in hundreds for jackson-databind for example. So I don't think I'd want to start managing additional contributor lists that way.

But I am not sure such list would be needed given that all contributions are done under CLA.

Aside from that, yes, filling out boilerplate would probably make sense.