Preferred format of Copyright statement

[Geoff Keating]

> 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>