From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 28962 invoked by alias); 11 Feb 2006 11:13:50 -0000 Received: (qmail 28938 invoked by uid 22791); 11 Feb 2006 11:13:49 -0000 X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from nile.gnat.com (HELO nile.gnat.com) (205.232.38.5) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.31) with ESMTP; Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:13:47 +0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by filtered-nile.gnat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id F113248CD95; Sat, 11 Feb 2006 06:13:44 -0500 (EST) Received: from nile.gnat.com ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (nile.gnat.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 18701-01-9; Sat, 11 Feb 2006 06:13:44 -0500 (EST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (hoosic.gnat.com [205.232.38.101]) by nile.gnat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 95AE548CBEC; Sat, 11 Feb 2006 06:13:44 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <43EDC6E7.2040407@adacore.com> Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:13:00 -0000 From: Robert Dewar User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Eli Zaretskii CC: gdb@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: Copyright notices References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gdb-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2006-02/txt/msg00100.txt.bz2 Eli Zaretskii wrote: > The last sentence is what took me by surprise, when Richard Stallman > asked people who work on Emacs to add 2006 to _all_ the files in the > distribution, regardless of whether they were modified in that year or > not. Well copyright notices have little if any legal significance these days, so I guess you can claim whatever you want without affecting the copyright status, but it sure seems strange to me to claim copyright for a new year if no substantive changes are made (I don't think you can use a recursive argument that says that you have updated the copyright because you *have* modified the file, namely you have updated the copyright year :-) > > Perhaps we should have a script to do the same once a year, and stop > worrying about updating the individual notices when we modify each > file. If it is going to be done by algorithm, then it seems a bit of a waste of time anyway. Given that the copyright lasts 90 years, I often wonder why we bother at all with this copyright year update stuff.