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

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.