Re: [lwip-devel] lwIP Copyright

[Kieran Mansley]

On Mon, 2010-09-27 at 20:44 +0100, Sprow wrote:
> In article <address@hidden>,
>    Bill Auerbach <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Should the copyright be updated year after year?  It states the copyright 
> > is only from 2001 to 2004.
> >
> > /*
> >  * Copyright (c) 2001-2004 Swedish Institute of Computer Science.
> 
> Copyright applies from the date the work was created onwards (usually for 50
> years past the author's death, but varies from country to country) so it's a
> bit pointless specifying a range of dates over which something is
> copyrighted since the lower date would always win.

With a work such as a maintained source file it is an ongoing creation,
and so the range of dates is showing the range over which it was
created.  Technically I suppose this means that some parts of the file
(the first bits to have been written) could have their copyright expire
before others (a later addition of a function for example).

> I think I'd vote against having a mass CVS update on January 1st every year!

Yes, that would be wrong.  The copyright message should be updated
whenever changes are made to a file.

I'm not overly concerned about this however, and the copyright ownership
has been ambiguous since SICS (through Adam Dunkels) stopped being
involved; there have been so many changes since then that most of the
source will have changed in one way or another, and we've made no
attempt to assign copyright to a group, so the actual copyright will be
held piecemeal by all those who have contributed.  

Kieran