Hi, so there is an abondoned project that I’d like to fork and I’m not sure how to deal with the licence & copyright notices:
The previous maintainer had the majority of the code licenced under MIT (one small part is Apache). Usually that would mean, that I just add my copyright notice and be done with it. But is there a justifiable way of “cleaning” up?
The repo has multiple authors but the copyright notices only ever refer to the maintainer (no “et al.” or similar) and on top of that are inconsistent: Sometimes a copyright notice is present, sometimes it’s not, sometimes there is only the template, i.e. it is literally copyrighted with the unedited template “Copyright <year> <your name> <your email>”, sometimes the licence is present, sometimes it’s not, there are typos in it, it’s a bit of a mess.
So, could I “clean up” by e.g. creating an AUTHORS.md, dump everyone in it, change the copyright notice to simply refer to the “XYZ authors” or something like that?