Question about copyright notices

[Carl Schwan]

Le jeudi, septembre 24, 2020 1:43 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> a écrit :

> El dimecres, 23 de setembre de 2020, a les 19:35:26 CEST, Andreas Cord-Landwehr va escriure:
>
> > On Montag, 21. September 2020 22:32:37 CEST Matthieu Gallien wrote:
> >
> > > Is there some consensus as to what is best for code hosted by the KDE
> > > community ?
> >
> > Hi, that is a good question! I cannot recall that we discussed this during the
> > last decade. Anyways, there is not a documented consensus either in the
> > licensing policy or in the licensing wiki. The REUSE project just says in
> > their FAQ [1] that there are several options. But I think it would be good to
> > have a preferred way.
> > Until today, I mostly saw the approach "author updated year on latest change",
> > but I also know KDE projects where mass-copyright updates were done in the
> > past.
> > Personally, I would prefer the way Johan described: Update the year only on
> > change. But that is only my opinion. What do the others think?
>
> If you're not doing any change you're not creating copyright because there's nothing being created, so yes i would not agree on updating the copyright if you don't change anything.
>
> Also remember that you don't need to really write that you have copyright on things, you create copyright by just creating the things, the copyright notices are a nicety not really a requirement if you have other things like git that can prove who and when something was created [*]

afaik, since copyrights are still valid for decades after the date of your death in
most countries[1]. I'm not sure it is really useful to update them.

Cheers,
Carl

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths
>
> Cheers,
> Albert
>
> -   Not a lawyer, not sure how valid a git commit log is to prove you created something in court
>
> > Cheers,
> > Andreas
> > [1] https://reuse.software/faq/#years-copyright