Re: Copyright information in source files

Hello Tom,

>> While we're talking about copyrights, I noticed while researching
>> something else that the PHP project recently got rid of all the
>> copyright years from their files, which is one less thing to update and
>> one less cause of noise in the change log for rarely-changed files. Is
>> there actually a good reason to update the year?
>
> Good question.
>
> I was wondering about something even simpler: is there a reason to have
> per-file copyright notices at all? Why isn't it good enough to have one
> copyright notice at the top of the tree?
>
> Actual legal advice might be a good thing to have here ...

I have no legal skills, but I (well Google really:-) found this:

https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html

"Contrary to popular belief, copyright notices aren’t required to secure
copyright."

There is a section about "Comparing two systems: file-scope and
centralized notices" which is probably what you are looking for.

The "file-scope" approach suggests that each dev should add its own notice
on each significant change. This is not was pg does and does not look too
practical. It looks that the copyright notice is interpreted as a VCS.

Then there is some stuff about distributed VCS, but pg really uses git as
a centralized VCS: when a patch is submitted, it is really applied by
someone but not merged into the code from an external source. The good
news is that git comments include the contributor identification, to some
extent.

Then there is the centralized approach, which seems just to require
per-file "pointer" to the license. Maybe pg should do that, which would
strip a large part of repeated copyright headers.

--
Fabien.