My understanding is that, under the Berne Convention, there is no requirement at all for any copyright notice, "Copyright", "(C)", "All Rights Reserved", or dates. The WTO requires compliance to TRIPS rules which thus apply these rules to practically every country in the world. Even the United States adopted the Berne Convention in 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
In my view, and I am not a lawyer, copyright headers are copyright theatre without any legal effect, and serve only to permit authors to appear serious and knowledgeable about copyright to people who know little about it. They are based in obsolete pre-Berne practices. Remember that the original GPL boilerplate was written just as Berne came to the US and was not widely understood. I would like to see headers that are more useful to readers and more maintainable. I would love to see a static header like this: /* * GeoTools, The Open Source Java GIS Toolkit <http://geotools.org/> */ All the copyright ownership and licensing information is here: http://geotools.org/about.html And we are done. So, what should we do? I think we are governed by OSGeo policy. Does OSGeo have a policy on headers? Has OSGeo obtained a legal opinion on this matter? Kind regards, Ben. On 23/04/16 01:01, Justin Deoliveira wrote: > Hi folks, > > Something I’ve been meaning to ask about is a clarification of why we have > to update copyright header dates to the current year for every file change. > As opposed to just having a static copyright header that signifies a > “copyright event” (like the change over to osgeo) and then stands for that > time forward. > > The reason I ask is because I think this policy has some negative things in > my opinion. For one it’s a pain for both contributors and reviewers to > enforce. I myself never remember as you probably well know and I would say > I am a pretty regular contributor. It also adds noise to patches and pull > requests, which also makes things harder to review than necessary. > > > Anyways, just curious as to the rationale behind this decision. My > apologies if this has been covered in previous email. > > -Justin > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Find and fix application performance issues faster with Applications Manager > Applications Manager provides deep performance insights into multiple tiers of > your business applications. It resolves application problems quickly and > reduces your MTTR. Get your free trial! > https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/302982198;130105516;z > > > > _______________________________________________ > GeoTools-Devel mailing list > GeoTools-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel > -- Ben Caradoc-Davies <b...@transient.nz> Director Transient Software Limited <http://transient.nz/> New Zealand ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Find and fix application performance issues faster with Applications Manager Applications Manager provides deep performance insights into multiple tiers of your business applications. It resolves application problems quickly and reduces your MTTR. Get your free trial! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/302982198;130105516;z _______________________________________________ GeoTools-Devel mailing list GeoTools-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
