I would also be in favour of removing the dates. For actively developed software, copyright expiry is a sort of fantasy concept. By the time author 1 has been dead for 70 years, the software has probably had thousands of authors who remain alive. I only use dates like that to get a rough idea of who was working on a project when, in which case (as you say) they should be kept updated. But I don't think it serves any real utility.
Best wishes, Dan On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 10:20 AM Tom Schwindl <schwi...@posteo.de> wrote: > > Hi all, > > I've recently (well, a few days/weeks ago) read quite a few discussions on > a wide variety of mailing lists about whether to remove the range of years > from the copyright notices or keep them. Since a few of our LICENSE files are > out of date too, I wonder if there is a consensus on what to do. > Should we update them and do the usual "bump the year" dance? > Or should we completely drop them and stop worrying. > I do not have strong opinions on this, but I think if the years are stated, > they should at least be correct. > > I like to link to the musl discussion here since they go into more depth on > the > topic. Unfortunately, I think they didn't come to a conclusion: > > <https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2023/01/09/4> > > The reason why I bring this up is that I think it's irritating, or at least > inconsistent, if a project is actively developed but the LICENSE file states > something like "(c) 2010-2015". > > -- > Best Regards, > Tom Schwindl >
