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man page copyright notice |
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Date: |
Sat, 2 Jun 2018 18:43:15 -0400 |
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Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.7.0 |
i noticed the copyright in the sed man page has "Copyright ©2017 Free
Software Foundation, Inc."
according to GNU policy[1] it should list each year that some
modification was made
> "Don’t delete old year numbers, though; they are significant since
they indicate when older versions might theoretically go into the public
domain, if the movie companies don’t continue buying laws to further
extend copyright. If you copy a file into the package from some other
program, keep the copyright years that come with the file.
> You can use a range (‘2008-2010’) instead of listing individual years
(‘2008, 2009, 2010’) if and only if: 1) every year in the range,
inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed
individually; and 2) you make an explicit statement in a README file
about this usage."
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html
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--- Begin Message ---
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Subject: |
Re: bug#31694: man page copyright notice |
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Date: |
Mon, 4 Jun 2018 10:59:12 -0500 |
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Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.8.0 |
tag 31694 notabug
thanks
On 06/02/2018 05:43 PM, bill-auger wrote:
i noticed the copyright in the sed man page has "Copyright ©2017 Free
Software Foundation, Inc."
according to GNU policy[1] it should list each year that some
modification was made
Actually, GNU policy is that _source_ files should list years that a
modification was made (either to that file alone, or a range of years
that any file in the project was modified even if that particular file
was not otherwise modified; the range option being a lot easier to
produce).
But if you go on to the end of the section, it says that for --help
output (which in turn feeds the man page):
"Sometimes a program has an overall copyright notice that refers to the
whole program. It might be in the README file, or it might be displayed
when the program starts up. This copyright notice should mention the
year of completion of the most recent major version; it can mention
years of completion of previous major versions, but that is optional."
Thus, there is no reason for the man page output to list all years; it
is sufficient (and compliant with GNU Coding Standards) to list only the
year of the current release.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html
As such, I'm closing this as not a bug.
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
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