[DRIVERS-329] Common policy for copyright dates in headers and documentation Created: 11/Oct/16  Updated: 17/Mar/20  Resolved: 11/Jun/18

Status: Closed
Project: Drivers
Component/s: None
Fix Version/s: None

Type: Improvement Priority: Major - P3
Reporter: David Golden Assignee: Unassigned
Resolution: Done Votes: 0
Labels: None
Remaining Estimate: Not Specified
Time Spent: Not Specified
Original Estimate: Not Specified

Issue Links:
Depends
depends on JAVA-2755 Update copyright dates Closed
depends on PHPC-890 Add license header to source files Closed
depends on PHPLIB-223 Add license header to source files Closed
Duplicate
is duplicated by DRIVERS-409 Update copyright dates Closed
Related
related to DRIVERS-323 Create notice for all third party lib... Closed
Driver Compliance:
Key Status/Resolution FixVersion
JAVA-2755 Fixed 3.7.0
PHPC-890 Done 1.2.3
PHPLIB-223 Done 1.1.1

 Description   

Per legal, header files should use the following format for date ranges: "<year the file was created>-present". For example:

# Copyright 2009-present MongoDB, Inc.
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# ...

Replace 2009 with whatever year the file was created.

For documentation footers, the following text should be used:

© MongoDB, Inc 2008-present. MongoDB, Mongo, and the leaf logo are registered trademarks of MongoDB, Inc.

Replace 2008 with the inception year of the project.

Original description follows
-------------------------------------

Different driver projects have different conventions for updating copyright dates in files:

  • Never update the year (list year of first creation)
  • Update the year in a file whenever the file is modified
  • Update all the files to the current year every year

Should we have a common approach? Does it matter?

As a criteria: if it doesn't really matter, we should choose the approach that requires the least amount of work for engineers.



 Comments   
Comment by Bernie Hackett [ 02/Dec/17 ]

The new policy seems to be the use of "<year file created>-present" in file headers. See the first few comments in DRIVERS-409.

Comment by Bernie Hackett [ 11/Oct/16 ]

Does the header need a year at all?

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