[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Changed copyright to 2006 - 2015 in version info

[Daniel Micay]

On 20/01/15 06:38 PM, Dan McGee wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:36 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 21/01/15 04:26, Robin de Rooij wrote:
>>> From 749dde01efdde4c69491c36c1244a112de54ce52 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>>> From: Robin de Rooij <rderooij685 at famousgoglemailhoster.com>
>>> Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:36:00 +0100
>>> Subject: [PATCH] Changed copyright to 2006 - 2015 in version info
>>>
>>> The copyright notice still displayed: 2006 - 2014. I changed the version
>>> method to 2006 - 2015
>>>
>>
>> This needs to be part of a larger patch that changes all our copyright
>> years to the correct range.
>>
> 
> We go through this seemingly silly exercise every year. Is it truly
> necessary?

AFAIK, it does have meaning (extends the lifetime of the copyright,
which expires N years after that date) but nothing stops you from
treating the entire project as one work and only having a top-level
license + copyright headers.

> We have this kind of thing now:
> 
> /*
>  *  pacman.c
>  *
>  *  Copyright (c) 2006-2014 Pacman Development Team <
> pacman-dev at archlinux.org>
>  *  Copyright (c) 2002-2006 by Judd Vinet <jvinet at zeroflux.org>
>  *
> 
> If we did something like this instead, we can then have one central
> COPYRIGHT file perhaps?
> 
> /*
>  *  pacman.c
>  *
>  *  See the COPYRIGHT file for individual attributions.
>  *
> 
> COPYRIGHT would look something like this:
> 
> Portions of this codebase fall under various copyrights and authorships. As
> the code is a continual work in progress and has been moved around and
> reshaped over time, copyright assignment to individual files does not
> always reflect reality. Please use version control tools to better grasp
> the lineage and history of a given piece of code. Known copyright holders
> include the following:
> 
> * Copyright (c) 2001 by François Gouget <fgouget_at_codeweavers.com>
> * Copyright (c) 2002-2006 by Judd Vinet <jvinet at zeroflux.org>
> * Copyright (c) 2005 by Aurelien Foret <orelien at chez.com>
> * Copyright (c) 2005-2006 by Christian Hamar <krics at linuxforum.hu>
> * Copyright (c) 2005-2006 by Miklos Vajna <vmiklos at frugalware.org>
> * Copyright (c) 2006 by David Kimpe <dnaku at frugalware.org>
> * Copyright (c) 2006 by Andras Voroskoi <voroskoi at frugalware.org>
> * Copyright (c) 2006 by Alex Smith <alex at alex-smith.me.uk>
> * Copyright (c) 2007 by Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>
> * Copyright (c) 2009 by Xavier Chantry <shiningxc at gmail.com>
> * Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Pacman Development Team <
> pacman-dev at archlinux.org>
> 
> 
> Thoughts? The copyright at file granularity concept seems super outdated to
> me.

It seems entirely useless if the project is under a unified license.

If there are various licenses, then isolating them can make sense. A
project might want to preserve liberal licensing for some files even
though it primarily uses the GPL, or it might want to isolate some GPL
code so the project can be liberally licensed if it is removed. None of
that is applicable to Pacman AFAIK.

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