Sphinx: copyright substitution and reproducibility

[David A. Wheeler]

> On Jul 10, 2024, at 2:15 AM, PICCA Frederic-Emmanuel <frederic-emmanuel.picca at synchrotron-soleil.fr> wrote:
> 
> What bout using Copyright <years>-now instead of this dynamic date.
> 
> I saw this is a few package I maintain.

Increasingly years aren't included, so I recommend avoiding that.

The Linux Foundation's
"Copyright Notices in Open Source Software Projects"
<https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-in-open-source-software-projects>
recommends that OSS projects should have statements like these:
* Copyright The XYZ Authors.
* Copyright The XYZ Contributors.
* Copyright Contributors to the XYZ project.

Rationale:
"These statements are intended to communicate the following:
* the work is copyrighted;
* the contributors of the code licensed it, but retain ownership of their copyrights; and
* it was licensed for distribution as part of the named project.
By using a common format, the project avoids having to maintain lists of names of the authors or copyright holders, years or ranges of years, and variations on the (c) symbol. This aims to minimize the burden on developers and maintainers as well as redistributors of the code, particularly where compliance with the license requires that further distributions retain or reproduce copyright notices."

For more details, see the web page.

--- David A. Wheeler