Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2017 10:22:14 -0700 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: rgrimes@freebsd.org Cc: Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky@freebsd.org>, src-committers <src-committers@freebsd.org>, "svn-src-all@freebsd.org" <svn-src-all@freebsd.org>, "svn-src-head@freebsd.org" <svn-src-head@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: svn commit: r314905 - in head/sys: compat/linuxkpi/common/include/linux compat/linuxkpi/common/src conf modules/linuxkpi Message-ID: <CANCZdfq3SMTJFrTRu5f7qtB=_q6D3A-4zCgqsxyLcjdQK5vbkg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfqFdx9pY8fwofQKOsuawsNhLj8gkpapqfipF4WZMcndQQ@mail.gmail.com> References: <CANCZdfpe9QOSZXcPy4juRRZgAJYqzSxOTOT8YuvxwqvzT6pfyA@mail.gmail.com> <201703081703.v28H3YUf001602@pdx.rh.CN85.dnsmgr.net> <CANCZdfqFdx9pY8fwofQKOsuawsNhLj8gkpapqfipF4WZMcndQQ@mail.gmail.com>
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On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 10:05 AM, Warner Losh <imp@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
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