Re: Removal of copyright years

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Thu, 06 Feb 2025 12:25:24 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<5177393.e8TTKsaY2g@soren-desktop>

On Thursday, February 6, 2025 12:12:44 PM MST Peter Wienemann wrote:
> Dear copyright experts,
> 
> recently the upstream authors of one of the packages I (co-)maintain
> adjusted the copyright statements of the project on the occasion of its
> integration into the High Performance Software Foundation.
> 
> As part of this change copyright years were removed from the copyright
> notice (see [0]). According to [1] this happened because the upstream
> authors "got tired of updating those years and it matches the LF
> recommendation" (where "LF recommendation" is a link to [2]).
> 
> I wonder what are the implications of this removal on the corresponding
> Debian package [3] and its copyright file.

I personally dislike this attitude, and I don’t consider the Linux Foundation’s advise to be 
optimal in this regard.

However, the core of the question from a Debian perspective is what we should do about it 
in debian/copyright.  Options are:

1.  Reproduce the upstream copyright as written (without any years).
2.  Add the year of the last commit to their copyright statement (as it is certain that at least 
one file was modified in that year).
3.  Go on a detective hunt to determine the range of all the copyright years.  This could be 
as simple as looking at the year of the first commit and the year of the last commit and 
producing a range, or as complex as looking at all the intermediate years to document any 
gaps.

I would personally go with 2 or 3.  In my opinion, no copyright statement is complete 
without a year range, because this tells you when the copyright would be expected to 
expire.  Number 2 tells you when the copyright on the totality of the files expires.  Number 
3 tells you the range of years when the copyright expires on parts of the contained work.  
It is left to the user to determine when copyright expires for a particular file if they need to 
know that information.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)