Re: Maintaining copyright notices

[John W. Eaton]

On 1/3/20 7:10 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> To minimize the difficulty of maintaining the copyright notices, I would 
> like to change Octave's sources to use what is described here
>
> https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html 
> [...]
>
> I'm ready to make these changes prior to the 6.1 release but would like 
> to hear from others before proceeding.

Thanks for the feedback.

I checked in the following changesets to use "The Octave Developers" for 
copyright notices in most source files and to update the copyright year 
for those to 2020:

  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/b442ec6dda5c
  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/1891570abac8

As stated in the commit message for the first changesetI skipped most of 
the files in the directories

  doc
  libgui/qterminal
  liboctave/external
  m4

I'm not sure what to do with the copyright and authorship of the Octave 
manual and, although we have modified some of them, the files in the 
other directories are mostly imported from elsewhere so I don't know 
that we should place the Octave copyright on them.

I used a script to generate the initial COPYRIGHT.md file.  I'm not sure 
that it's necessary to add it to the hg archive, but I can share it if 
there is interest.

Comments and further suggestions?

jwe