Re: Removal of copyright years
* Soren Stoutner:
>> recently the upstream authors of one of the packages I (co-)maintain
>> adjusted the copyright statements of the project on the occasion of its
>> integration into the High Performance Software Foundation.
>>
>> As part of this change copyright years were removed from the copyright
>> notice (see [0]). According to [1] this happened because the upstream
>> authors "got tired of updating those years and it matches the LF
>> recommendation" (where "LF recommendation" is a link to [2]).
> I personally dislike this attitude, and I don’t consider the Linux
> Foundation’s advise to be optimal in this regard.
The LF recommendations actually say this (quite unsurprisingly):
| Don’t change someone else’s copyright notice without their permission
|
| You should not change or remove someone else’s copyright notice
| unless they have expressly (in writing) permitted you to do so. This
| includes third parties’ notices in pre-existing code.
<https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-in-open-source-software-projects>
It's hard to make a generic statement what constitutes “someone else's
copyright notice”. The case here is somewhat borderline. But as far
as I can see, the project only changed their own Copyright lines, and
not the lines on imported files.
Reply to: