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Re: Copyright notices
- From: Robert Dewar <dewar at adacore dot com>
- To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>
- Cc: gdb at sources dot redhat dot com
- Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 06:13:43 -0500
- Subject: Re: Copyright notices
- References: <uhd76xif1.fsf@gnu.org>
Eli Zaretskii wrote:
The last sentence is what took me by surprise, when Richard Stallman
asked people who work on Emacs to add 2006 to _all_ the files in the
distribution, regardless of whether they were modified in that year or
not.
Well copyright notices have little if any legal significance these
days, so I guess you can claim whatever you want without affecting
the copyright status, but it sure seems strange to me to claim
copyright for a new year if no substantive changes are made (I
don't think you can use a recursive argument that says that you
have updated the copyright because you *have* modified the file,
namely you have updated the copyright year :-)
Perhaps we should have a script to do the same once a year, and stop
worrying about updating the individual notices when we modify each
file.
If it is going to be done by algorithm, then it seems a bit of a waste
of time anyway. Given that the copyright lasts 90 years, I often wonder
why we bother at all with this copyright year update stuff.