Sean Whitton <[email protected]> writes: > Right. So good free software citizenship requires, I think, supplying > the years, with our future descendents in mind.
For the purposes of determining when code goes out of copyright, I would think the version control repository would be even better. The dates feel like a pre-version-control fallback. That fallback is not without value; there are a lot of situations, such as Debian packaging, that often discards the original version control repository when producing widely distributed artifacts. But a preserved original version control repository or some timestamp-preserving conversion of it seems strictly better than the copyright notices for this purpose, since it attaches a date to every hunk of code with context and isn't constrainted to the granularity of a copyright notice. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
