Re: Removal of copyright years

Richard Laager <[email protected]> Thu, 6 Feb 2025 17:57:06 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 2025-02-06 13:12, Peter Wienemann wrote:
> 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 maintain a package which did away with the years upstream.

I personally like the removal of the years. I've since followed that 
myself in many cases.

In theory, the year should be bumped on the first change of the 
year--that is sufficiently expressive to obtain copyright--to a given 
file. A close approximation of that would be to bump the year on the 
first change of the year to a given file.

Some (many?) projects will update the year on every copyright statement 
every year. IMHO, this is pointless busywork that's also wrong (because 
the passage of time does not grant a new copyright).

Other times, the years only get updated sporadically. In that case, they 
aren't accurate either. So what purpose do these years serve in practice?

Copyright notices aren't required anyway. Even if there was no notice, 
the code would still be under copyright. So even if the lack of the year 
makes the notice legally defective, it's moot.

Also, if one thinks years should be updated, do you also think that the 
list of authors needs to be correct on a file-by-file basis? If so, the 
list of copyright notices could easily get absurdly long for a 
long-running popular project. And even then, many of those notices will 
be out-of-date as someone's code is removed or rewritten.

-- 
Richard

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