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Re: Preferred format of Copyright statement
- To: RDBrown at mira dot net, RodneyBrown at mynd dot com
- Subject: Re: Preferred format of Copyright statement
- From: Geoff Keating <geoffk at cygnus dot com>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 10:14:05 -0700
- CC: gdb at sources dot redhat dot com, binutils at sources dot redhat dot com, gnu-misc-discuss at gnu dot org
- References: <200008151314.XAA00259@iji.local>
> From: Rodney Brown <rdb@cygnus.com>
> Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 23:14:51 +1000 (EST)
> Copyright 1990, 91, 92, 93, 94, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>
> This form would allow ~ 9 year numbers in the list before needing to
> wrap to two lines as compared with ~ 6 for the 4-digit year form implied
> by the FSF Information for Maintainers page.
> GDB has at least one file with a list of 13 years.
>
> According to section 2.7 of the Copyright-FAQ, it would be a
> valid (US) Copyright notice (IMO - which has No legal worth)
> <ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/Copyright-FAQ/part2>
>
> Does this form meet the FSF need for squeaky clean legalities?
No. The FSF asks for full 4-digit years. The statement above should
be:
Copyright 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999 Free Software Foundation,
Inc.
I know this has a tendency to line-wrap, but so what? No human will
ever care. So we might as well make it completely correct.
--
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@cygnus.com>