IPython is licensed under the terms of the Modified BSD License (also known as New or Revised or 3-Clause BSD). See the LICENSE file.
Fernando Perez began IPython in 2001 based on code from Janko Hauser <jhauser@zscout.de> and Nathaniel Gray <n8gray@caltech.edu>. Fernando is still the project lead.
The IPython Development Team is the set of all contributors to the IPython project. This includes all of the IPython subprojects.
The core team that coordinates development on GitHub can be found here: https://github.com/ipython/.
IPython uses a shared copyright model. Each contributor maintains copyright over their contributions to IPython. But, it is important to note that these contributions are typically only changes to the repositories. Thus, the IPython source code, in its entirety is not the copyright of any single person or institution. Instead, it is the collective copyright of the entire IPython Development Team. If individual contributors want to maintain a record of what changes/contributions they have specific copyright on, they should indicate their copyright in the commit message of the change, when they commit the change to one of the IPython repositories.
With this in mind, the following banner should be used in any source code file to indicate the copyright and license terms:
# Copyright (c) IPython Development Team. # Distributed under the terms of the Modified BSD License.