Note on Inline Authorship Information in scikit-learn

Author: Adrin Jalali

Historically, scikit-learn’s files have included authorship information similar to the following format:

# Authors: Author1, Author2, ...
# License: BSD 3 clause

However, after a series of discussions which you can see in detail in this issue, we could list the following caveats to the status quo:

• Authorship information was not up-to-date and in most cases, but not always, reflect the original authors of the file;
• It was unfair to all other contributors who have been contributing to the code-base;
• One can check the real authors and the history of the authors of any part of the code-base using git blame and other git tools.

Therefore we came to the conclusion to standardize all authorship information to mention “The scikit-learn developers”, and have the license notice as:

# Authors: The scikit-learn developers
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause

The change is to happen gradually in the coming months after April 2024.