Russ Allbery [28/Aug 9:43am -07] wrote: > 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.
Agreed, though one other thing that occurs to me is that sometimes we commit old programs to VCS (e.g. copied from another repo) and then the copyright date becomes the only record of when they were actually written (unless you are really careful to pass --author or something). -- Sean Whitton
