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Copyright years
- To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Subject: Copyright years
- From: Jeffrey A Law <law at cygnus dot com>
- Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2001 15:52:19 -0700
- cc: gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Reply-To: law at redhat dot com
------- Forwarded Message
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
For those who haven't heard, the year is now 2001. That means that
whenever you change a file with a copyright notice at the top, you
should add 2001 to the list of copyrighted years.
For those who work on GNU programs, I have appended the relevant
extract from the GNU maintainer notes.
When you update the copyright notice, make sure it looks reasonable.
Specifically, if 2000 is not listed, but the file was changed in 2000
(you can use `cvs log' to check this), go ahead and add 2000. We
often forget to update the copyright notice when a change is made.
Ian
Copyright Notices
=================
You should maintain copyright notices in all files of the program. A
copyright notice looks like this:
Copyright 19XX, 19YY, 19ZZ COPYRIGHT-HOLDER
The COPYRIGHT-HOLDER is usually the Free Software Foundation, Inc., but
may be someone else.
The list of year numbers should include each year in which you finished
preparing a version which was actually released, and which was an
ancestor of the current version.
It is important to understand that rule carefully, much as you would
understand a complicated C statement in order to hand-simulate it.
This list is *not* a list of years in which versions were released. It
is a list of years in which versions, later released, were *completed*.
So if you finish a version on Dec 31, 1994 and release it on Jan 1,
1995, this version requires the inclusion of 1994, but doesn't require
the inclusion of 1995.
The versions that matter, for purposes of this list, are versions that
were ancestors of the current version. So if you made a temporary
branch in maintenance, and worked on branches A and B in parallel, then
each branch would have its own list of years, which is based on the
versions released in that branch. A version in branch A need not be
reflected in the list of years for branch B, and vice versa.
However, if you copy code from branch A into branch B, the years for
branch A (or at least, for the parts that you copied into branch B) do
need to appear in the list in branch B, because now they are ancestors
of branch B.
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