The project I'm involved in currently has headers of the following form:
The X Development Team
Organization A - Organization B - Organization C - Copyright 1999-2018
This file is distributed under the terms of the
GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1
But these headers are incomplete: the project has received lots of contributions from people who do not belong to any of the listed organizations. Given that the project has a CREDITS file with a listing of all the authors and their institutions / organizations, I want to change the first part of the headers to the following:
The X Development Team
Organization A and contributors - Copyright 1999-2018
(see CREDITS file for the list of authors)
Keeping "Organization A" hightlighted in such a way makes sense because it is the organization which has contributed the most to the project by far.
I know that this kind of clause "and contributors" is common practice in the FOSS world. But is it also OK to remove explicit mentions of some copyright holders in the process of moving to such a clause (knowing that they are still listed in CREDITS)?