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

"Andrea Pappacoda" <[email protected]> writes:
> On Fri Aug 28, 2026 at 9:20 PM CEST, Marvin Renich wrote:

>> And the MIT-style license includes:
>>
>>     The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be 
>>     included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
>>
>> And the BSD license:
>>
>>     Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright 
>>     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
>>
>> Debian is not permitted to change or add a date to upstream's 
>> copyright notice.  Doing so violates the license.

> I think this refers to the license text itself, not the copyright 
> notice.

The BSD and MIT licenses specifically include the copyright notice.

That said, I don't think we have to be too persnicketty about this. I have
previously argued that it's fine to consolidate copyright notices for the
same author with different years in debian/copyright. This feels similar.
Retaining or including the copyright notice doesn't require a
byte-for-byte representation, at least IMO. If our notice conveys the same
semantic information and we don't break the legal requirements for a
copyright notice, transformations like consolidating copyright notices in
debian/copyright seems fine?

But I would draw the line before adding years, since adding years is a
change in the semantic content, not just a formatting change. It's still
arguably fine under the license (we are preserving the notice and just
adding some additional bits), but it's questionable enough that it feels
weird.