No, this case cannot be made. You are likely mixing up licensing and copyright here. Licensing (in the absence of a CLA) follows the inbound=outbound principle, i.e., it is understood that inbound contributions are made under the same terms as the outbound license. However (in the absence of a copyright assignment agreement) each contributor retains copyright for their contributions.
I'm certainly not confusing licensing and copyright, Nikita, and with due respect - you don't know what you're saying for a fact, neither does anybody really, as I'm not aware it's ever been tested in court. We have purposely included the copyright notice on each and every file, and whether adding code to such files out of one's free will constitutes written consent or not is at the very least debatable (and potentially has different answers depending on the jurisdiction). And while this may not bother you personally, this discussion comes up every single year when the inevitable year increment PRs start rolling in. The most recent one for 2019 is https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3730, which triggered this mail. I am rather predisposed against commits that touch a large part of the codebase to make a change that is not just wholly unnecessary, but also legally extremely dubious. If the yearly sed annoyance is the true source of the issue then let's go with one of the proposals made on that thread – i.e. use "-present" or just "(c) The PHP Group" without years. Zeev (sorry for the HTML email, there's a bit of a mess with my email client right now.)
