Codecov Report

Merging #510 into master will increase coverage by 0.04%.
The diff coverage is n/a.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master     #510      +/-   ##
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+ Coverage   99.27%   99.32%   +0.04%     
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  Files          89       89              
  Lines       10405    12578    +2173     
  Branches      721     1235     +514     
==========================================
+ Hits        10330    12493    +2163     
- Misses         58       66       +8     
- Partials       17       19       +2

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I'm sorry I've been procrastinating so much on making a decision here! I am being indecisive because this is obscure legal stuff that probably doesn't matter too much or... does it? Well, probably not enough to actually talk to a lawyer. But then I have to decide! Etc. But that's still no excuse to leave you hanging.

So, as far as I understand:

• Copyright notices don't really... do that much. They don't need to be present, or accurate, for copyright to apply. But they can give you a somewhat better position in court if you do have to go to court, and they're cheap, so people generally use them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice#Reasons_to_include_an_optional_copyright_notice
• Once a copyright notice is added, they can never ever be removed (b/c all the standard OSS licenses require that they be kept as a condition of having a license at all). Technically this even applies to copyright statements that are flat-out inaccurate. Unless the courts decided it didn't, I guess, because of some public interest consideration or something, look I'm not an IP lawyer.
• There is a rule for what they're supposed to look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice#Form_of_notice_for_visually_perceptible_copies
  • Basically: "ⓒ [year] [owner]", where "year" is the "year of first publication", which is awkward here because it was originally intended for like, books, which are generally published once and then never changed. I think for our purposes basically any content changes count as a "new publication". Maybe?

Options:

• Merge this. I have some nervousness that automatically changing the year will lead to an incorrect notice that can never be removed. I guess in fact it's sort of inevitable since all software eventually becomes unmaintained. OTOH that's a long time from now and by definition will be someone else's problem. Also, seriously Nathaniel no-one cares about these technicalities. Practically every package on PyPI has broken licensing because setuptools doesn't provide any way to comply with a term that's present in every OSS license. This has literally zero practical consequences.

• Decide to just keep it 2017 forever because again, who cares, and that's certainly not wrong. This is also a very popular strategy (more because of laziness than intention).

• Put something like "Copyright Ⓒ 2017 and later, Nathaniel J. Smith and contributors", and figure that that will be accurate forever.

Put something like "Copyright Ⓒ 2017 and later, Nathaniel J. Smith and contributors", and figure that that will be accurate forever.

+1

Thanks! Okay, that's much more complicated than I thought it could be. :) The issue I have with keeping 2017 is that it makes it look like the docs are stale, so I would also be happy with option 3. Closing for now.