Re: Fixing copyright notices on gnome.org websites

[Josh Triplett <josh joshtriplett org>]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 08:08:19PM +0100, Alexandre Franke wrote:
> Some of our websites (wiki.gnome.org, www.gnome.org, help.gnome.org…)
> have a notice looking something like "Copyright © 2005-2014 The GNOME
> Foundation". There are several issues with that.
>
> First of all copyright is automatic so you don't actually have to put
> a "stamp" on a website for it to be under your copyright. Therefore
> the notice is not there for legal reason, but as a courtesy to people
> who may want to copy content to let them know whom the copyright
> belongs to. As such, the date is unimportant and having it wrong (or
> correct but not current as it can also happen, see next paragraph) is
> more of a distraction than actually useful.
>
> Now you might think that a few lines of code could make it trivial to
> have an always up to date year. The issue here is that if you do have
> a date, it has to be the date of last non trivial modification. That
> means you cannot just have current year automatically inserted,
> because you may not have made any edits on said year (yet). It is also
> debatable whether each page needs to have its own date, which is also
> technically more complex. And if you manage to have the correct dates,
> you get reports that it is not since it is not current (even if a page
> that's not been changed since 2014 should indeed have 2014 as its last
> year). I guess there are many other problems and there's not much
> point in trying to list them all here.
>
> Bottom line is a) you don't need dates and b) if you really wanted to
> keep them it would be a big source of problems.
>
> With that proposal, the new notices would be "© The GNOME Foundation"
> (in addition to any Creative commons or other license that would
> remain unaffected by this change). We discussed this at our latest
> board meeting and while there was a general agreement that this is the
> way forward, we decided to give the community a chance to weigh in. If
> you have any insight about this, please do share!

Unless the individual contributors working on the site have actually
legally assigned copyright to the GNOME Foundation, those contributors
likely retain their own individual copyrights.  (And I don't think we'd
want to require such an assignment.)

It doesn't seem worthwhile to attempt to include a pile of individual
copyright notices on every page, but "© The GNOME Foundation" doesn't
seem quite accurate either.  Perhaps it'd make sense to just drop it
entirely?