svn commit: r314905 - in head/sys: compat/linuxkpi/common/include/linux compat/linuxkpi/common/src conf modules/linuxkpi

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 10:05 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>>> The project's guidance to
>>> committers for the last 20 years is to do a range of copyright dates.
>> The projects guidance has wrongly been changed then, as I have
>> always tried to make sure the A, B, C-D information was applied
>> correctly.  I do have a fairly good understanding of copyright law.
>>
>> Can you point to any "published" project guidance on this manner?

When the guidance was originated, we used
https://www.oppedahl.com/copyrights/ as a guide since I knew Mr
Oppedahl personally and we talked about it at the time. He recommended
that we use ranges, as he does in his FAQ. He said it was the safest
way to not mislead about the copyright dates. Microsoft uses ranges of
dates, even when they haven't made changes in every single year. Of
course, talking to a lawyer about this gives one a big "it depends"
and things get fuzzy. The practical implication might be an inability
to enforce the license terms at the end of the 90 years that people
have copyrights for, so as a practical matter he suggested that for
open source a range was the best compromise between an exhaustive list
of years and never updating the notice.

It is (or at I think it was) in the developers portion of the
handbook, but I can't find it now. It's implicit in style(9) (I made
the changes there). It's come up several times in the past.

But like I said, please feel free to improve things by getting a
definitive statement that our current range is wrong from the lawyers
and getting their recommended advice. However, this has been SOP for
the last 20 years, so there's many places that would need to be
corrected.... I doubt that's it's a windmill worth tilting at, but
it's your time.

Warner