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Preferred format of Copyright statement


Emerson's "A foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds ..."
feels apt, but anyway...

GDB, binutils and GCC all have some FSF copyright notices using a
year range which the "Information For Maintainers...- Copyright Notices"
<http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain_4.html#SEC4> says not to use.

My perl script will correct this, remove "(C) "s and leave FSF
copyrights in the form Ian Lance Taylor recommended in
<http://sources.redhat.com/ml/binutils/2000-02/msg00076.html>.
viz:

Copyright 1990, 91, 92, 93, 94, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This form would allow ~ 9 year numbers in the list before needing to
wrap to two lines as compared with ~ 6 for the 4-digit year form implied
by the FSF Information for Maintainers page.
GDB has at least one file with a list of 13 years.

According to section 2.7 of the Copyright-FAQ, it would be a
valid (US) Copyright notice (IMO - which has No legal worth)
<ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/law/Copyright-FAQ/part2>

Does this form meet the FSF need for squeaky clean legalities?

To avoid future ambiguity, I'd add additional rules.

. On each line, the year list should begin and end with a 4-digit year.
. The copyright-holder should not be split across lines.
. If the copyright-holder is split from the Copyright line, it should
  carry at least one year to emphasize continuation.
  (Indentation? or just use indentation?)
We choose one of the following:
. The first year in the list in a new (popularly defined) century should
  be a 4-digit year.
 or
. The first and last year in a list in a (popularly defined) century
  should be a 4-digit year.

ie 1996-2002

Copyright 1996, 97, 98, 99, 2000, 01, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
 or
Copyright 1996, 97, 98, 1999, 2000, 01, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

ie 1995-1999, 2002-2004

Copyright 1995, 96, 97, 98, 99, 2002, 03, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
 or
Copyright 1995, 96, 97, 98, 1999, 2002, 03, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

ie 1990-1999

Copyright 1990, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 1998,
1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

 or maybe

Copyright 1990, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 1998,
          1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

I'll summarize followups and tweak my script accordingly.

Note that the gdb, gcc and binutils COPYING files are all
"GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 2, June 1991" which uses the
Copyright (C) form which is no longer recommended in the
"Information for Maintainers".

My script currently targets FSF and Andrew Cagney's copyrights.
If a Cygnus => Redhat renaming is required, or particular other
copyright statements should be adjusted, let me know.
--
Rodney Brown
(& yes my mail configuration is broken).

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