Re: [ft-devel] 2.4.7 Copyright Years

[Werner LEMBERG]

Erik wrote:

> Older patch I have:
> /* Copyright 1996-2007, 2010-2011 by */
> 
> I was thinking that perhaps at some point, someone accidentally
> merged a patch into trunk that undid the 2011 change and then 2.4.7
> was released?

Yep.

Antoine wrote:

> By the way, I believe both are unnecessary complex. The only dates
> which are significant are the one from the first copyright
> assignment, and the one from the last modification (assuming of
> course no change of copyright holders, or place of living of them.)
> So here I assume 1996-2011 does the trick.

I abuse the copyright dates to register the years of changes.  Since a
few months the GNU lawyer says that using the pattern XXXX-YYYY is OK
(previously, you hade to insert each copyright year without using a
dash), so I'm slowly converting it to using the more compact form.

> On the other hand, just modifying a file to update the year of
> copyright assignment is not fully correct IMHO if there are not any
> substantial modifications in the file itself.

This is not correct.  See here for more:

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


    Werner