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

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Jan-2011, Olaf Till wrote:

| On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 06:49:45PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
| 
| > Actually, the FSF recommends updating the copyright year in all
| > files in any year they are published.
| 
| Really? It seems not appropriate to me if nothing in the file has
| changed. And in this Howto of the FSF:

Please see

  
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html#Copyright-Notices

It includes this statement:

  To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you have
  made nontrivial changes to the package. (Here we assume you’re using
  a publicly accessible revision control server, so that every
  revision installed is also immediately and automatically published.)
  When you add the new year, it is not required to keep track of which
  files have seen significant changes in the new year and which have
  not. It is recommended and simpler to add the new year to all files
  in the package, and be done with it for the rest of the year.

and now I see later in the file that part of my question is already
answered:

  But if contributors are not all assigning their copyrights to a
  single copyright holder, it can easily happen that one file has
  several copyright holders. Each contributor of nontrivial text is a
  copyright holder.

  In that case, you should always include a copyright notice in the
  name of main copyright holder of the file. You can also include
  copyright notices for other copyright holders as well, and this is a
  good idea for those who have contributed a large amount and for
  those who specifically ask for notices in their names. (Sometimes
  the license on code that you copy in may require preserving certain
  copyright notices.) But you don’t have to include a notice for
  everyone who contributed to the file (which would be rather
  inconvenient).

So I think we should just add the current year to all copyright
notices in a file when the notices are updated.  I'm now thinking that
once someone claims copyright on a file, there is no reason to drop
that person later.

Then all notices could be of the form

   Copyright (C) YYYY-2011 NAME

where YYYY is the first year of claimed copyright (or the year that
the file first appeared in Octave).  I have no problem with including
all years since the introduction of the file since there has been
publication (releases, snapshots, or public CVS/hg archives) in each
year since 1993.

Doing this would solve most of the problems with updating the notices
and I think it would be fairly easy to do the update at least
semi-automatically.  But what should happen to a notice when a file is
merged with another, or parts are extracted into a separate file?

We would not have to worry about any of this if we assigned copyright
to a single copyright holder (for example, the FSF, or an "Octave
Foundation").  But then accepting patches would be slowed by requiring
coypright assignments.  I would be willing to do it, but I'm not sure
we could get agreement from everyone who has made substantial
contributions.

Currently, we have some people who have made large contributions but
who have not claimed copyright on anything, or at least not on any
files that they did not create from scratch.  Then there have been
others who have claimed copyright when they have made only small
changes.  If everyone claimed copyright for every change, no matter
how small, then it's not hard to imagine cases where we could end up
with files that have more notices than lines of code, and the
situation will only get worse over time as more people contribute.
I'd rather avoid that if possible.

jwe