Re: Collapsing copyright year lists to ranges

[Karl Berry]

Hi Joseph,

    It was recently confirmed for GDB 
    <http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2012-01/msg00936.html> that it's OK 
    to collapse a list of copyright years into a single range

I discussed this with Donald.
He didn't intend to go beyond what is already stated in maintain.texi.

The crucial question is whether a package was published in a given
year.  Such publication could be done in any of several ways:
- an actual release of a new version, of course.  Either public or beta.
- being in a public VC repository; then publication is automatic and
  continuous.
- making an interim release intended for further redistribution.
  For example, if the package ended up in a Cygnus release in a given year.

Given that a package as a whole was published in a given year, it is ok
to include that year in the range for all files in the package.  It's
not necessary for the individual file to have been modified.

However ... if a package was not published in any form during a given
year, then it is not ok to include that year in the range.  And
unfortunately, I expect that is the case for some of the early years in
gcc/glibc/gdb/etc.

So ... the most expedient approach I can imagine would be to determine
the year that the sources were put into a public VC.  Say that was 1995.
Then keep all the years prior to 1995 as they are in the copyright line,
and end the list with 1995-2012, obviously just incrementing going
forward.  (Just an idea.)

I'll see if I can clarify the wording in maintain.texi, but the above
was always the intent.  The bottom line is that copyright law does not
let us include a year for which there was no publication at all.

Best,
karl