Hi Werner, Werner LEMBERG wrote on Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 12:50:35AM +0200: > Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>> [...] Consequently, bumping the list of copyright years in such a >> case is a misrepresentation of the legal situation - unless you >> bumped based on some *other*, indeed copyrightable change, but a >> quick "git log -- FDL" gives me the impression that is not the case. > The FSF thinks differently: The copyright years should be the same in > all files of a package. Oh. Just in case anybody wonders about that, here is a link: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html So trying to paraphrase the relevant part, the argument is that it is legally sufficient and simpler to regard all files having the same copyright holder as one work (as opposed to treating each file as a separate work), and consequently cite the same list of years in each of them. Of course, that doesn't apply to files included from outside sources or having other copyright holders. I wasn't aware of that FSF recommendation, thanks for pointing it out. It doesn't look like groff is following it very rigourously, or more files would have copyright notices saying 1989-2014 or something similar. From a quick look at the output of "find . -type f -exec grep Copyright {} \;", i couldn't find a single file using that convention. Quite to the contrary, almost all files at least seem to attempt documenting their very own copyright years. Whatever, you are certainly perfectly free to choose your own policy in this respect. :-) Changing "2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008" to "2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008, 2014" without changing the content does not seem consistent with either policy, and it looked like a common error that happens when people try to follow the "copyright notice per file" policy. Yours, Ingo
