[kepler-dev] updating copyrights

[Christopher Brooks]

Hi Chad,
I've struggled with copyrights over the years.

The Ptolemy rule is that we use a range of dates for the copyright.
The first date is the year the file was created.
The second date is the year the file was last modified.

The first date can be tricky.  If the file is based heavily on an earlier file,
then I would use the copyright date of the earlier file.
My reasoning is that if the two files are substantially similar, such
that it is obvious that they have the same source, then using the earlier
date is correct.  So, to me, files that were in Kepler 1.0 and transferred
to the Kepler-2.0 build structure should contain their earlier file dates.

The second date is the date of last modification.  So, code cleaning
can update the second date.  I usually avoid changing how I code clean
so that the second date does not get updated every time.  However, for
Kepler-2.0, having a second date of 2010 for all files makes sense because
the file was moved to a new location.  We could quibble about this,
but I would just go with a second date of 2010.

So, I think that going for 2004-2010 would seem reasonable for Kepler 1.x
files.  At a first cut, I would just generate a list of files shipped in
1.x and try to match by name.

Other files should have dates that correspond with that of their first
creation, which can be obtained from svn.  It makes sense to have a file
that was created in 2009 have a 2004 copyright only if that file is
basically a copy of a 2004 file.  Thus, much of the build system would probably
not have a copyright of 2004-2010, though there might be some files that
are copied from Kepler-1.x that would have a 2004-2010 copyright.

I have some badly written scripts in ptII/adm/copyright that do some of the
work.  ptII/doc/coding/releasemgt.htm has some instructions
about how to use the scripts.

Before updating the copyrights, the first step is to build a release and
determine what files are being shipped.  Then, comparing with Kepler-1.x
is the next step.

I can help on this some.

BTW - The ptII repository will be cleaned tomorrow (Wednesday), during
which time I'll be updating the ptII copyrights.

_Christopher

On 1/26/10 11:12 AM, Chad Berkley wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been doing some work on bug 4686, trying up update the copyrights
> in the kepler source code. I've been looking more into when the date on
> a particular source file's copyright statement should be updated. It
> looks like the date needs to be updated to the current year if the file
> has been modified in the current year. Unfortunately, since we have done
> so much refactoring in the last year, every single file has been touched
> in SVN so it's impossible to do an automated check on whether a file
> should have its date changed.
>
> So I pose these questions to the kepler community:
>
> 1) Should we (can we legally) change the dates on all of the source
> files in the kepler repository since they technically have been touched
> this year.
>
> 2) If not, how should we proceed with this? Updating the entire
> repository by hand will be very time consuming.
>
> 3) If so, should I just change all files to have a date range starting
> with the original copyright and extending to 2010, or should I just
> change it to 2010? For example, if a file currently says "copyright
> 2004", I could change it to be "2004-2010" or to just "2010".
>
> Thanks in advance for any thoughts or knowledge you have on this subject,
>
> chad
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-- 
Christopher Brooks, PMP                       University of California
CHESS Executive Director                      US Mail: 337 Cory Hall
Programmer/Analyst CHESS/Ptolemy/Trust        Berkeley, CA 94720-1774
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