Re: Question about copyright headers of JIT-related files

[Julien Bect]

Le 03/02/2019 à 17:23, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso a écrit :
> On Fri, 2019-02-01 at 08:49 +0100, Julien Bect wrote:
> > Le 01/02/2019 à 04:44, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso a écrit :
> > > On Thu, 2019-01-17 at 22:03 +0100, Julien Bect wrote:
> > > > JIT-related source file have the line "Copyright (C) 2012-2019 Max Brister".
> > > >
> > > > I was wondering about the reason this, since Max Brister contributions
> > > > were all done in 2012, 2013.
> > > Unless a great tragedy has happened, I believe Max is still alive.
> > > Since we are still publishing (reprinting?) his work, his years of
> > > copyright are still getting updated.
> > >
> > > Admittedly, we've never been too careful about not updating copyright
> > > years for those who are no longer alive.
> >
> > You are certainly very funny, but it was an honest question...
> It was an honest answer. I wasn't trying to be funny. We certainly do
> have some dead contributors in the codebase (I mean, Octave has been
> around for close to three decades now), and we've never been too
> careful to make sure we don't update their copyrights again.
>
> Copyrights for living people are updated if their works are
> republished. That's what we're doing for Max. We're continuously
> publishing his work, every year.


Ok, thank you for explaining.  (But then, according to your argument, 
copyright notices should be updated for every living author ?)

My own understanding of copyright notices is that "Copyright XXXX-YYYY 
SomeOne" is supposed to mean that SomeOne has produced versions of the 
work in each year of the range XXXX-YYYY.

Which is why (again, in my understanding) you sometimes see complicated 
copyright notices such as:

./libinterp/parse-tree/oct-parse.cc:5:   Copyright (C) 1984, 1989-1990, 
2000-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

So, I just don't understand the point of "updating a copyright" 
(extending the range) after SomeOne has stopped contributing (whether 
he/she is alive or not, by the way): if the file is re-published with no 
significant changes, then the copyright notice could stay the same.  If 
there have been significant changes by other people, then copyright 
notices can be added for these people.

But obviously, IANAL and now I can see (cf Kai's email) that this is the 
way things are done in the entire Octave code base, not just in 
JIT-related files.  Fine.

@++