On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 5:50 AM, Ian Booth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi folks > > The question recently came up in reviews as to whether we should be > updating the > date in the copyright statement in the file header when we make a change > to the > code in that file. I sought clarification from Robie Basak, who previously > had > provided input on licensing issues and compliance for getting Juju > included in > trusty. Below is what he said. > > TL;DR; > It doesn't really matter, we just need to agree on a policy. It is > suggested > though that we do update the date when we make a change. Agree? > > <snip> > > > > What's our policy for dates in copyright headers? > > > > // Copyright 2012, 2013 Canonical Ltd. > > // Licensed under the AGPLv3, see LICENCE file for details. > > From the point of view of acceptability for Ubuntu, it doesn't > particularly matter, and I don't believe it'll cause any issue for us > whatever you do here. I'll certainly be happy to upload whether or not > you update the date. > > I'll try to explain my perspective on this, but I'm not entirely > confident that there isn't something I'm missing for the broader > picture, so note that I Am Not A Lawyer, etc. > > > For the above, do we need to add 2014 if we modify the file this year? > > Or is the date just meant to be the year the file was first published? > > I think it's meant to be the sum of all the copyright claims on the > file. So if you add some new code, you have a copyright claim on the new > code in the newer year in which you made it. > > AIUI, the purpose of the date is that since copyright expires > (theoretically, anyway), updating the date updates the copyright claim, > which would give us more control in the (eventual) event that copyright > expires. > > In practice, IMHO this is never going to matter since nobody is going to > care about the copyright on a piece of software that is that old anyway. > But I suppose laws could change, so the right thing to do would be to > add a new year whenever you make a change in a new year on a per-file > file basis. BTW, it's common to fold "2012, 2013, 2014" to just > "2012-2014". > > But I don't particularly care for upload purposes. > Depending on the country, copyright notices require the first year of publication. I'm not aware of any that *require* the full range, but in some cases it is recommended to have it on ongoing works as a claim of authorship. As Gustavo says, we have this in revision control. We work in the open. Let's not get distracted with unnecessary work.
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