Re: Maintaining copyright notices

[PhilipNienhuis]

John W. Eaton wrote
> The Octave source files currently contain copyright notices that list 
> individual contributors.  I adopted these file-scope copyright notices 
> because that is what everyone was doing 30 years ago in the days before 
> distributed version control systems.  But now, with many contributors 
> and modern version control systems, having these file-scope copyright 
> notices causes trouble when we update copyright years or refactor code.
> :
> <snip>
> :

Agreed that Octave's way of handling copyrights was becoming a bit beside
the point, esp. that issue of moving parts of code around, I often wondered
about that.
So I'm happy with all your suggestions. It'll make things a lot easier.

But I have a question (maybe nitpicking):

What about contributions from people who want to stay anonymous at all cost?
I had (and may have later on) that situation for the of-mapping package.
After checks for originality (and often some reworking up to complete
overhaul) I checked them in & added copyright under my name, all to the
satisfaction of that particular anonymous contributor (see e.g.,
https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?9475).
Q. ==> Do we also explicitly mention somewhere that we have anonymous
contributors?

Philip



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