Re: copyright years in the copyright file

[Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu>]

Osamu Aoki <osamu_aoki_home@nifty.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 01:56:21AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> The copyright years in /usr/share/doc/getmail4/copyright are incorrect
>> (not up-to-date). I have reported bug 743161[*] about that, but it has
>> been closed because upstream doesn't care. This means that some time
>> in the future, people could think that some code has fallen into the
>> public domain, while this is actually not true. One may also wonder
>> whether new code is distributed in the same license (one could
>> interpret the lack of copyright notice update as unspecified license
>> for the new code).
> 
> Upstream considers this is good enough and 1 year is nothing to fuss
> about.  See http://marc.info/?l=getmail&m=131805611901165&w=2
> | Neither.  I update that when I happen to notice another year has gone by
> | (getmail is more than a decade old at this point) -- but it's not
> | important to keep it current.  Having that year out-of-date has no legal
> | effect under the Berne copyright convention.
> 
> Thus, I do not think this is a bug.

The information is still misleading to end-users.  This makes it a
minor bug.  But it is still a bug.  Since upstream is not willing to
fix it, Debian can.  If Vincent is willing to do all of the work of
preparing a correct patch, I do not see a good reason to refuse to
apply the patch.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@caltech.edu