Compact license header

[paulirish]

This is motivated by wanting fewer than 16 lines of boilerplate at the top of every source file. :)

I have reviewed all internal licensing requirements (go/releasing/preparing) and this is the best we can do. The Golang project (and many projects in Go) use a very compact header. (example) however while this shortform boilerplate is permitted for BSD and MIT, Apache requires all the text.

So essentially, we nuke all the newlines. :)
And we drop from 16 total lines down to 5. 📉 sgtm!

As a start, this PR just changs a single source file header. If it's sgtm, then I will update all files.

[patrickhulce]

Apache requires all the text.

:( I don't have strong feelings. I don't like many lines, but I've started to ignore it and I also don't like really long lines, haha.

[ebidel]

Is the goal to make the build smaller? Personally, I'd prefer keeping the full boilerplate in source and removing/re-adding at build time. We can use the gulp-license with tiny: false to re-add it to the bundle.

It's also worth noting the Polymer teams gets away with a minimal header and links to the full license (example). WDYT of that?

@tjsavage how was that done?

[paulirish]

Is the goal to make the build smaller?

nah that's not what i was targeting. (sorry for not being clear on that!)

its to improve the developer story. less scrolling. higher signal:noise ratio of the sourcebase. since our implementations will be increasingly reviewed by folks (who aren't contributing), it'd be nice to improve the visual accessibility of the code.

gulp-license

Also from my research on this topic it looks like we probably shouldn't be using tiny:true in the built version. :/ Though TBH I didn't find any specific conversations of deployed JS code, as the constraints there are slightly different.

Polymer teams gets away with a minimal header

Yeah projects licensed under BSD and MIT (polymer is bsd) can get away with the shortform: https://goto.google.com/ooiik (internal link)
And someone asked specifically for a more shortform for Apache but the guidance was to go long: https://goto.google.com/gxiub (internal). (That form would have def been ideal for me, but oh well. :/ )

[brendankenny]

I breeze right over the license header as well, so it doesn't bother me. I've never really heard of anyone complaining about it before, actually :)

I will say that often when I look at other people's source code just the shape of the license header is a good first check of what license they're using, so it is a shame to lose that Apache 2.0 shape.

[wardpeet]

I don't have any issues with the large license either. More scrolling is extra exercise 💪