Re: copyright years in the copyright file

[Osamu Aoki <osamu_aoki_home@nifty.com>]

Hi,

On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 06:51:48AM +1000, Riley Baird wrote:
> > The upstream of the getmail writes this as his original code without
> > making copyright assignment to FSF.  He is the licensor and not the
> > licensee.  Thus, he is not bound by the quoted GPL2 license terms at
> > all.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > This is exactly the reason why I as the licensee must not change the
> > upstream provided "copyright notice".
> 
> Ah, okay. Could you at least change the debian copyright file? You're
> not changing the notice there; you're making a new one.

No.  Please read the Debian Policy: 12.5 Copyright information
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s-copyrightfile

| Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright
| information and distribution license in the file
| /usr/share/doc/package/copyright. 

If you make a *change*, then it is not a *verbatim* copy any more.

What I can make is to add a comment documenting the situation.  This can
be requested as wishlist feature request bug.  I do not see the value of
such action and I will mark such request as wontfix.

Please seriously think about the VALUE.

Regards,

Osamu