Hello Sam, On Tue 01 Dec 2020 at 08:07AM -05, Sam Hartman wrote: > * Sean would prefer that you not be able to collapse years. He hasn't > said whether his objection is strong enough to try and block > consensus. My initial comments were motivated by the very same concerns as Russ: On Sat 21 Nov 2020 at 12:30PM -08, Russ Allbery wrote: > In reality, this only matters because we have licenses that say it > matters. For example, the BSD license saying: > > 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright > notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. > > We're already arguably not *quite* following that rule by allowing > coalescing of notices. I think that's fine because (at least in US law) > the copyright notice is soemthing with a legal definition and the > coalesced form is legally equivalent, so we're preserving the notice in > the way that matters. But in order to rely on that argument, it feels > like we should keep the notice legally equivalent, which would mean not > adding years. If there is a consensus within the FTP Team that collapsing years does not violate this sort of condition in the text of licenses, then (qua Policy Editor) I would be happy to permit collapsing years. I have made some enquiries to try to determine whether the FTP Team has a consensus view on this. If the FTP Team is not really sure whether this sort of thing is okay, we could permit collapsing years just when the license does not have a copyright notice reproduction requirement (see the changes in #955005 for another example of making Policy copyright notice requirements conditional on particular licenses). -- Sean Whitton
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