I think this is needless busy work, I vote that as long as there is a copyright header with _a_ year, that is sufficient.
On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Ian Booth <ian.bo...@canonical.com> wrote: > Hi folks > > The question recently came up in reviews as to whether we should be updating > the > date in the copyright statement in the file header when we make a change to > the > code in that file. I sought clarification from Robie Basak, who previously had > provided input on licensing issues and compliance for getting Juju included in > trusty. Below is what he said. > > TL;DR; > It doesn't really matter, we just need to agree on a policy. It is suggested > though that we do update the date when we make a change. Agree? > > <snip> >> >> What's our policy for dates in copyright headers? >> >> // Copyright 2012, 2013 Canonical Ltd. >> // Licensed under the AGPLv3, see LICENCE file for details. > > From the point of view of acceptability for Ubuntu, it doesn't > particularly matter, and I don't believe it'll cause any issue for us > whatever you do here. I'll certainly be happy to upload whether or not > you update the date. > > I'll try to explain my perspective on this, but I'm not entirely > confident that there isn't something I'm missing for the broader > picture, so note that I Am Not A Lawyer, etc. > >> For the above, do we need to add 2014 if we modify the file this year? >> Or is the date just meant to be the year the file was first published? > > I think it's meant to be the sum of all the copyright claims on the > file. So if you add some new code, you have a copyright claim on the new > code in the newer year in which you made it. > > AIUI, the purpose of the date is that since copyright expires > (theoretically, anyway), updating the date updates the copyright claim, > which would give us more control in the (eventual) event that copyright > expires. > > In practice, IMHO this is never going to matter since nobody is going to > care about the copyright on a piece of software that is that old anyway. > But I suppose laws could change, so the right thing to do would be to > add a new year whenever you make a change in a new year on a per-file > file basis. BTW, it's common to fold "2012, 2013, 2014" to just > "2012-2014". > > But I don't particularly care for upload purposes. > > > > -- > Juju-dev mailing list > Juju-dev@lists.ubuntu.com > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju-dev -- Juju-dev mailing list Juju-dev@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju-dev
