Copyright year in LICENSE files

[annevk]

The discussion in #51 never really resolved the year question properly and since 2018 we have not bumped the year in LICENSE files across our repositories as it's easy to forget without automation. The standards themselves do include updated years as they are automatically generated.

Before investing effort into this I'd first like to get a more definitive answer as to whether it's needed at all.

[foolip]

@whatwg/sg I think there are mainly two options:

• Use the year when the file was created and never update it
• Update files to have a range of years when touched

The first option is the status quo. @annevk do you have a preference if multiple options could be made to work?

[annevk]

My preference is a magical third option where we are not required to list a year. Failing that I suppose never updating would be nice, but that will make it out-of-sync with the standards where we do update it (technically they are newly created files, so...). See the final paragraph of https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#acks for instance.

(Translations (discussed in #59) are yet another place where these years would end up as currently proposed with perhaps yet another year, depending on how timelines line up.)

[hsivonen]

Surely there's a third option:

• Not having a year in the notice.

[othermaciej]

Automatic updating is the safest choice. We can also ask lawyers if it's ok to have no year.

[annevk]

@othermaciej please ask them. It'd be great to have a more definitive answer on whether it's okay to not have it at all. We're now rather inconsistent across a large set of files in many repositories and automating them all would be a bit of a hassle.

[foolip]

We have gone back to get legal input on this and now have the answer: it's OK for us to not include the copyright year in copyright notices.

I've self-assigned to implement this, which I think amounts to updating https://github.com/whatwg/sg/blob/master/LICENSE and https://github.com/whatwg/spec-factory/blob/master/LICENSE.template.

@annevk are you aware of any other places we have a hardcoded copyright year?

[annevk]

That's really great, hurrah!

The specifications themselves (in the Acknowledgments section usually through Bikeshed templating except for HTML) and some repositories not covered by spec-factory, such as https://github.com/whatwg/whatwg.org. (It seems some repositories lack a LICENSE file, I've filed some issues already.)

[annevk]

Overview (in somewhat ideal order of landing):

• Remove year from example LICENSE file #132 (needs SG signoff due to policy change)
• Meta: remove year from copyright line html#5668
• Remove year from WHATWG copyright line speced/bikeshed#1714
• Remove year from example LICENSE file spec-factory#18 (plus the 14 (15 minus HTML) resulting PRs)
• Remove year from copyright line participate.whatwg.org#115 (can land sooner, but after the first)
• Remove year from copyright line whatwg.org#337 (can land sooner, but after the first)

Other LICENSE repository issues are tracked in #133.

[foolip]

Everything in #102 (comment) is done now.