Justin, I appreciate the work you have put into this one, especially your examination of other OSGeo projects, but in my view, copying the practices of other projects is another form of circling. Many of these practices trace their origin to the US pre-Berne. The first GPL licence was written in 1989, and the BSD code base is much older. Old habits die hard.
Under SCCS, RCS, and CVS, every file had its own revision. In Subversion and Git, the state of the whole code base as a single revision. It was also much more common in the olden days to export code from the VCS because of file-level locking of checkouts (oh, SCCS on Solaris, how do I hate thee). With Git, everyone can clone, and everyone has the file history. (Justin, this is for the benefit of the list: you taught me pretty much everything I know about Git.) My fear is that file-level notices with dates is a practice that accommodates technologies that are no longer in use and conforms to laws that are no longer in effect. My preference is to centralise licence information and have a bare-bones statement without dates on files. I think we have a great opportunity to reduce duplication and simplify our workflow. As at least one option has changed, I think we should re-vote. I liked this comprehensive discussion of the issues: https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html Kind regards, Ben. On 21/05/16 09:04, Justin Deoliveira wrote: > We keep on going in circles on this one. No OSGeo doesn’t have any rules > to follow here, if they did we would be following them. If we want to > “follow OSGeo rules” the best thing we can do is look at what the other > established projects do. I looked at both MapServer and GDAL/OGR and they > appear to do the same thing that has been proposed here: they only update > dates in the copyright header when the copyright changes or a file is > created. I gauged this by looking at bunch of recent commits and the > headers in those files. If folks closer to this problem know otherwise > please share. -- Ben Caradoc-Davies <b...@transient.nz> Director Transient Software Limited <http://transient.nz/> New Zealand ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ GeoTools-Devel mailing list GeoTools-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
