I don't think blanket updates to the copyright years are strictly
correct. If a file is modified in 2001, 2003 and 2005, the years should
be called out explicitly. And if a copyright line says 2001-2004 and
the file has had no modifications in 2005, there is no reason to add
that year to the copyright line.
But I suppose alterations in whitespace can count as a change, and maybe
one could take it so far that modifying the copyright notice is a change
to the file, so updating the copyright is ok/correct even though it is
unnecessary.
If one considers publishing a book, if every year the new printings
simply added the current year to the copyright, then it would seem an
obvious attempt to prevent lapse into the public domain. Though I guess
people would be allowed to borrow from the pieces of the document that
were in place at any time past which the copyright expires. So the real
effect is that it just makes it more difficult to know when a particular
bit of code/text may be treated as public domain.
Given that copyrights are essentially perpetual and we have public
version control, it's both irrelevant and easy to determine, so I'm not
suggesting it is something that we need to get particularly anal about.
John McNally
Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
>Hi,
>
>"a fool has a tool"...
>
>I ran my shiny newly released CodeWrestler over the Torque code base and
>
>- updated all license headers to read 2001-2005
>- added missing license headers to files
>- removed all trailing blanks from the files
>- made sure that all xml and xml-line files contain a <?xml header line
>- made sure that all java class files have their package statement on
> top
>
>Please check whether this broke anything (it didn't for me, but you'll
>never know...).
>
> Regards
> Henning
>
>
>
>
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