On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 04:16:00PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > On 2020-04-23 13:29:54 -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 08:09:08PM +0200, ilf wrote: > > > I think it's fair to honor Kevin as maintainer more than "others". > > > I would propose something along: "Copyright (C) 1996-2016 Michael > > > R. Elkins, 20XX to 2020 Kevin J. McCarthy, and others. > > > > No, it MUST NOT say that. That states that only Michael Elkins > > contributed copyrightable work from 1996-2016, which is false, and > > contradicts the previous copyright messages. > > > > It should only update the date. It would be acceptable to add names, > > to the list, but... why? If you do, be sure to add mine, OK? =8^) > > > > [This is why we do not do that.] > > BTW, copyright notices do not say who contributed, but who owns > the copyright.
In most cases, this is a distinction without a difference, particularly in Mutt. The owner of a copyright is the person who authored the work, i.e. the contributor, unless that person or entity has legally assigned their copyright to someone else. Mutt does not ask its contributors to do this, so AFAIK the contributor is always the copyright holder. > In particular, even if Michael Elkins did not contributed after > 2016, he is still part of the copyright owner in 2020, because the > work (this version) still contains code he wrote (and this code has > not fallen in the public domain). > > Also note that year ranges (or list of years) are ambiguous. For > instance, this version of Mutt is not the one that was published > in 1996. The copyright notice should normally give only the year > of the first publication, which will be 2020 for version 1.14. This is not completely accurate, at least under US law. If you keep a mix of old and new content, your copyright date may be a range of years instead of a single year. You will often see this in revised editions of old books, though the practice does seem to be less common recently. This is the case with Mutt, and we had this conversation when Thomas revised the copyright notices the first time someone pointed out they weren't current while he was maintainer. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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