Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Two question which I have to pass on

[Karl Berry]

    > I suggest adding a summary of this thread's answers: importance of
    > each publication date, ambiguity of ranges, etc.

    If it is so ambiguous why not use English?
    Copyright (c) 2003 through 2009 Free Software Foundation

This is all beside the point, as far as I understand it.  To the best of
my knowledge (from my research and what Eben said once), it is *the law*
that says you have to write each year, separately, as four digits.
Period.

All the other arguments are arguable (and plenty of people have argued
them :).  Thus I see no reason to bring them up.

Personally, I think it is quite useless in practice to list all these
four-digit years.  But I also think it is not worth the risk, however
small, to deviate from the law and put the software's copyright status
in doubt.  It is not that big a deal.  It just annoys our programmer
minds, which want to do it efficiently/usefully.  The law doesn't care.

If someone else has time to do more research into the legal notices at
loc.gov or other *authoritative* sites (not, say, the random opinions
expressed on wikipedia or debian-legal), and finds something that
indicates otherwise, I will be glad to know it and take it further.
Until then, I hope this is the end of the debate.

karl