Copyright years

[David Edelsohn]

>>>>> dewar  writes:

dewar> The form of a range (as in 1995-1999) is pretty standard, and used by both
dewar> IBM and Microsoft (whose lawyers presumably understand these issues). As
dewar> time goes by, the unnecessary insistance on a list of dates indeed becomes
dewar> burdensome, and I think the range is far preferable.

	The official recommendation is to list two dates separated by a
comma:

Copyright (C) Acme Corp. 1966,2001.  All Rights Reserved.

The first year is the year of first delivery/release of the module and the
second year is the year of first delivery/release of the latest
substantial changes.  Using a dash to span years is ambiguous and I have
been told that it does not have a legal meaning in this context.  Given
that the GCC public development continually releases snapshots, the recent
date continually needs to be updated.

	RMS has said that he has been advised to list each year of any
substantial change individually.  Because the Free Software Foundation
holds title to GCC, we follow their request for handling copyright
updates, regardless of IBM and Microsoft policy.

David