Re: RFC: one more question about year ranges in copyright notices...

[ams at gnu dot org (Alfred M. Szmidt)]

   On 1/4/12 1:46 AM, Joel Brobecker wrote:
   > Hello,
   >
   > I thought I was giong to do my best to forget about this as soon as
   > the copyright notices would be updated, but what do you guys think
   > of Jan's remark:
   >
   >>> +    1986, 1988, 1989, 1991-1993, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
   >>> +
   >>> +... is abbreviated into:
   >>> +
   >>> +    1986, 1988-1989, 1991-1993, 1999-2000, 2007-2011
   > [...]
   >> IIUC this would allow us to write 1986-2011 everywhere as the GDB
   >> package was nontrivially modified each of these years.  Just restating
   >> Joseph.
   > Not totally critical, but I am seduced. I found that the formatting
   > of many copyright headers look a bit ugly before the list of years
   > shown in the notice is long enough that "Free Software Foundation, Inc."
   > would not fit on the rest of the line.
   >

   I agree with making it 1986-2012 everywhere uniformly.

   For files with new code, it would be nice if the first year in the
   pair could be the year of the file's creation - it's a little
   jarring to see something like tic6x-tdep.c with a 1986 date at the
   top of it.

The creation date of a file might not coresspond to the year when the
content of the file was written.  If tic6x-tdep.c was created based on
another files content, then it would be correct to add 1986 to the
list of copyright years.

   On the other hand, a copyright range like 2005-2012 makes it
   unclear if one is trying to say that that a particular file was
   modified each year in the range, or that it's "inheriting" the
   range from GDB as a whole.

AFAIK: The range is means that the copyright holder has asserted his
rights as a copyright holder each year during that period.  It has
nothing to do with if the particular file was modified during that
year.