Copyright Statement Years

[Mark Atwood]

> Can you cite some examples of those large companies publishing open
> source code without a year?

Facebook   https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/LICENSE

Microsoft  https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT

Amazon  I dont have any Amazon examples yet.  I work for Amazon's OSPO and so examples will be happening soon

>  Do you have any legal analysis on this you
> can share, publicly or privately?

I can share privately f2f off the record.  Will you be at Open Source Leadership Summit in a few weeks?

Sharing the legal analysis publicly, especially under a corporate byline, turns into "giving legal advice".  Which is frustrating, given all the petite lawyers  who want to get all "well, actually..." and "its not broke, dont change things" this.

> 
> I'm asking for three reasons:
> 1) My own curiosity

Learning is always good.

> 2) Wearing my Debian packager hat, in case this comes up with Debian
>    when I bring in the next NTPsec release with all the years scrubbed
>    and update debian/copyright to match.

Do please scrub it from the Debian package.

> 3) Because I'd like to convince others of this point, so I can stop
>    having to maintain copyright statements all over the place.

Please do.

Other Debian packager people are welcome to email me direct. In fact, they can do so to my work address at <atwoodm at amazon.com>

Thanks!

..m