Re: Copyright years in source code

[Mark Atwood]

Is there any question for me to answer in this thread?

I dont considering myself controlling of the gpsd project.  Does the gpsd 
project want me to be?

I do think that the gpsd project can scrub all the years out of their copyright 
statements, include the "year of first publication".

One of the reason for simplifying the text of the copyright statements in this 
way is because if the day ever does come that there is actually is a copyright 
lawsuit and that it does turn on the point of "what year was it published", the 
digits after the word "copyright" are not actually controlling.  Instead the 
parties before the court will spend a bunch of analysists and researchers on 
all the actual publication artifacts and incidentals to publication, and use 
that to determine what year is what.

In modern terms, what that means is they will look in the git history and the 
email headers, and at any 3rd party tech news publications, and use that.

Scrub the dates.  Use the text "Copyright the contributors of the GPSD 
project".  Put SPDX-License-Identifiers in.

..m