Re: d/copyright years when upstream does not use years?

On Fri, Aug 21, 2026 at 02:08:57PM +0200, Agathe Porte wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> (please keep me Cc'ed, not subscribed to the list)
> 
> TL;DR: copyright years are a mess, do we really want to force copyright
> years using a lintian tag and force debian maintainers to update their
> d/copyright for d/* each year? I propose we rework these lintian tags, I
> can do the work but wanted to discuss it on -devel first.

First off, yay, somebody else who likes copyright notices without years :)

So IMHO there are both good and bad things in copyright notices that
do not include years:
- good thing: you don't need to update it each year, and it does not
  get very, very long as you skip a year every now and then :)
- bad thing: it seems that, at least in the United States, such
  a copyright notice may not be recognized in court

As such, it is (obviously) up to each upstream project and each package
maintainer to decide whether they want to keep the copyright years.
I personally have been actively removing them from the projects that
I am upstream for, with the full knowledge that this may be an issue in
the US. However, it is completely understandable that there may be
upstream authors (including e.g. my current employer) who do not feel
comfortable with the possible US issues, and so they keep the years in
for their projects.

Having said that, I personally think that it is still the common case
that people would rather include the copyright years. As such, IMHO
the Lintian tag is still a good thing, and in the very few cases when
it triggers for a project that simply does not have copyright years,
it should be overridden: this is exactly the case when overriding
a Lintian tag is supposed to happen. That's what I've been doing in
the Debian packaging for the above-mentioned projects where I have
removed the copyright notices as an upstream author, and I personally
do not see that as a maintenance burden.

So I would suggest, at least for the present (while upstream projects
without copyright years are a very rare occassion and there are actually
good reasons for upstream authors to put the copyright years in), to
not change anything in Lintian and override that tag for the few
projects where it is warranted. Let's see if, with time, more upstream
projects drop the copyright years; if that happens, let's discuss this
again :)

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
PGP key:        https://www.ringlet.net/roam/roam.key.asc
Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115  C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13

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