Update Copyright statements in Code Files

• Oct 3, 2020 - 13:39
Type
Development
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

As discussed in the comments on PR #6593, it may be time to update the copyright statements in the code files.
I am willing to do this, if somebody could guide me a bit about what I should do exactly.

Should I just update them all to the following:

//=============================================================================
//  MuseScore
//  Music Composition & Notation
//
//  Copyright (C) 2020 MuseScore BVBA and others
//
//  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
//  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.
//
//  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
//  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
//  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
//  GNU General Public License for more details.
//
//  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
//  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
//  Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
//=============================================================================

Of course in the cmake files # instead of //.
I won't touch the "third-party" files.

Some files have quite a different version:

//  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
//  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2
//  as published by the Free Software Foundation and appearing in
//  the file LICENCE.GPL

Should I update those too?

Some files say for example Copyright (C) 2002-2018. Should we lose the 2002- ?

And some files say

//  MusE Score
//  Linux Music Score Editor

Is it okay to get rid of these "traces of history"?

Whenever I come across a case which isn't straight-forward, I will post a comment in this issue.

The advantage of having uniformity in all files, is that we can update them in the future by just using "find and replace".


Comments

Reg.: GPL 2: I believe it is planned to change that to GPL 3, and if this still is the plan, I'd rather postpone the changes to the copyright and combine it with that GPL change.

And probably do all this for the master branch only, for the 3.x branch I guess we'd better restrict this to added files.