Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:
On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 12:09:35AM -0500, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
AFAICT, sources are -all- still copyright 2005. That's not right.
The 1.3 branch is 2004, and it had a 2005 release ;)
Even if we determine we'll -quit- updating the copyrights until they
are modified, we need to update them when we modify them.
Everytime we add a change we are updating the actual copyright. I don't
know about policy, but the copyright notice itself doesn't really matter
from a legal perspective, it merely serves as a courtesy of where to
find potential licensors.
Whoa - that's not correct(!) Although the details are tricky, and although
copyright no longer requires 'registration' of the copyrighted material, you
still must claim it or lose it, afaik. (IANAL)
The dates don't matter except as to establish
a minimum term for the copyright, but the real copyright is related to
when the author dies - not when the code was written (so we should
encourage young healthy committers! ;).
Uhmmm... yes and no, the maximum (not minimum) term is interrelated to the
death of the copyright holder, AIUI.
Also there isn't a lack of material which would establish when some code
was written.
Hehe, now that's true...
Updating the copyright notice in each file sounds like way too much work
:) I hate both the old yearly massive diff, and trying to remember to
change the value every time. How about we embed $Date$ and leave it at
that?
We can either just do something like;
/*
* Copyright the Apache Software Foundation or its licensors, as
* applicable.
*
* $LastChangedDate$
*
* Licensed ...
Or include the start date too.
Well, by some means, I'm -0 on anything which isn't automated :)
Maybe a post-commit that looks at sources for expected patterns, e.g.
/* Copyright nnnn-nnnn
and autofixes them on commit? Is that doable?
Alternately, if svn can dump us a list of files touched in the present year,
we might be able to script that through our usual copyright update pass. It
would be a pre-roll process, e.g. we would touch them as we roll a release.
Bill
