It looks as though the copyright headers could use attention in
addition to the FSF address changes I just sent.  At least some of
them seem to be missing years for significant changes and just say
`Copyright ... David Roundy' when there are significant contributions
from people who presumably haven't assigned copyright.  I guess adding
`and others' to the attribution is OK, since contributors are in
AUTHORS, but IANAL.

I started on this issue a couple of days ago. I've asked around
some, and it appears that for at least countries adhering to the
Bern convention (many) the copyright notice is not in any way
necessary (if you can prove in some way authorship of the file).

It's not hard to investigate the precise submitter of any piece
of code in darcs, should it be needed, like for a legal
disagreement of some sort.

The biggest benefit of correct copyright notices is the
convenience for external parties. A general copyright notice
would not bring so much convenience, but it would at least give
a good starting point for those patient enough to investigate
further.

This task is very boring and even more time-consuming, so I'm
unassigning myself from it, but I'll try to keep track of new
changes that I push to the stable repo, and take notes so I can
update copyright notices just like I do with changelog entries.

It might be a good idea to cobble together a little shell script to
semi-automate this.

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 09:03:10AM +0000, Eric Kow wrote:
> It might be a good idea to cobble together a little shell script to
> semi-automate this.

I only found this recently, but Debian has licensecheck(1) in the
devscripts package.

Can we just scrap them everywhere? I hate these things, they clutter the
source code with noise and nobody likes to maintain them so nobody does.
And - as tommy said - it is no problem to re-construct authorship from
the darcs repo (e.g. use darcs annotate).

I am not willing to spend time with this nonsense.

If someone wants to, http://hackage.haskell.org/package/headroom is a good tool for it.