copyright notices (was: Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?)

[John W. Eaton]

On 15-Dec-2010, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| >   * Update copyright years.
| 
| You actually need to do that? I did not know that.

Yes.

Actually, the FSF recommends updating the copyright year in all
files in any year they are published.  Given that we use a public
archive for development, all changes are published immediately, so we
should really be updating the copyright notices near the beginning of
each year.

This now somewhat complicated by things like

  Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
                2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 John W. Eaton
  Copyright (C) 2009 Jaroslav Hajek
  Copyright (C) 2009, 2010 VZLU Prague

(in src/data.cc) or 

  Copyright (C) 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 David Bateman
  Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Andy Adler
  Copyright (C) 2010 VZLU Prague

(in liboctave/Sparse.cc).

One good thing is that the FSF has now changed its position on using
ranges of years instead of requiring that each year be enumerated
separately, so these statements can be condensed somewhat, but that is
only part of the problem as I see it.  The bigger problem is deciding
exactly which of these statements should be updated with the new year.
All of them?  That has not been done in the past, and I think it is a
bit strange to retroactively add someone to the copyright statement
for a prior year if the first change they made was this year (for
example).  And in the first second case above, I think we stopped
adding new years for Andy Adler since he was no longer working on the
code.  But that is not consistent with what we would do if the
copyright were held by a single person.  In that case, we would update
the list of years regardless of whether there were any changes to the
file made by the person listed in the copyright line.

jwe