On 16/09/2015 04:34, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
Sorry, but it is. The copyright information you type in your source code starting to lie practically immediately you commit the code. It does not hold the water in any format proceedings, lying to reader, and annoying to maintain to author. It does not says what specifically one has a copyright to and is wrong practically everywhere in boost.
No, it's not lying in the slightest. The important thing is who the *original author* of the work was (in this case, the individual source file). This is the person in the copyright notice and the year in which they created this file. (As others have noted, in most cases the specific year is not that interesting other than to indicate that it's after a certain date, since copyright tends to be tied to the author's lifetime rather than the origin date.) That original author has then chosen to license the work by the BSL, which in turn gives *other* authors the right to effectively "borrow" the original author's copyright and distribute the work (the file) and make derivative works based on it. The derivative works are still copyright by the original author and date unless both parties agree that the changes are substantive enough to warrant an additional or replacement notice. It is perfectly valid for the copyright notice to never be updated, even if the file is changed substantially. It is *not* valid for the original notice to be modified without specific agreement by the original person. It is *not* valid to remove it entirely, as then you do not know that the license grant is valid or who made it. It is *not* valid to specify a non-legal-entity as the copyright holder (so you can't say "lib X contributors").