As many open source projects have started doing it, we're removing the
current year from the copyright notice, so that we don't need to bump
it every year.
It seems like only the first year of publication is technically
relevant for copyright notices, and even that seems to be something
that many companies stopped listing altogether (in a version controlled
codebase, the commits are a much better source of date of publication
than a hardcoded copyright statement).
We also now list Godot Engine contributors first as we're collectively
the current maintainers of the project, and we clarify that the
"exclusive" copyright of the co-founders covers the timespan before
opensourcing (their further contributions are included as part of Godot
Engine contributors).
Also fixed "cf." Frenchism - it's meant as "refer to / see".
Each file in Godot has had multiple contributors who co-authored it over the
years, and the information of who was the original person to create that file
is not very relevant, especially when used so inconsistently.
`git blame` is a much better way to know who initially authored or later
modified a given chunk of code, and most IDEs now have good integration to
show this information.
smix8
Rémi Verschelde
Josh Jones