RFC: stop doing "grand replace" updates to copyright years

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Hi there,

Every year, we go over the source code to update the copyright years
that are found in the source headers. I propose to stop this.

We started doing this because of the GNU standards which say

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

but we aren't following the instructions: the instructions are to only
update the year if there were nontrivial changes to the file. IIUC,
this could make some difference in 95 years (?) from now when versions
of the file might enter the public domain (assuming humans still exist
as a species, and has a need for beautifully typeset music).

I believe this advantage does not weigh up against the disadvantages,
which is that it makes the output of git-log harder to read, and that
the process takes up time and effort that could be more productively
spent elsewhere.

Also note that many other projects (eg. git) seem to survive just fine
without yearly exercise like this. Also, at $dayjob, there are no
instructions to do this, despite open source work being carefully
overseen by lawyers.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - hanwenn@gmail.com - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen