I'm not sure if "contributors" is enough for legal requirements. I'm not a lawyer, still I assume using an undefined bunch of people (i.e. "contributors") properly is not valid for copyright assignment.

@elextr are you referring just to the About dialog or any copyright notice in the whole source code?

Maybe someone else has a better knowledge of the legal requirements. @frlan ?

As far as I know - and this may just be a North American thing - but it's not required to explicitly indicate copyright using such notices, but rather the act of publishing something automatically grants the copyright. If this is indeed the case, the mailing list/version control history provides the proof of copyright ownership of the original authors.

Alternatively, we could require contributors to transfer copyright to the Geany foundation (or whatever it's called) which is setup in Germany. Personally I'm against this as it provides too much friction and I personally never contribute to projects which require this.

Other than doing nothing, the easiest solution would be to just append [", et al."](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/et_al.) at the end of each copyright notice line, probably.

In Europe is nearly clear: You cannot get lost of your Urheberrecht. You don't have to explicit claim it., Which is slightly different from American copyright. However as Geany is a product of it's community I suggest to make it more general.

Or any better suggestions?

Maybe remove the end date (present) altogether, I don't think it changes when the copyright will expire (long after us).

Possibly just leave the old names/emails and append ", et al." or "and others".

[For example this](https://gist.github.com/codebrainz/5c9447c7e36d4e33cbde0dd90853383c/revision...). I don't have any real preference though.

While at it, I would also remove the "All rights reserved" notice as it seems not necessary at all nowaydays (according to Wikipedia).

👍 I don't think it's consistently used either.

Its important in legal issues to make a reasonable attempt at precision, just hand waving "and others" isn't appropriate.

I'm don't know Latin, and am not a lawyer, but I believe that ["et al."](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/et-al) is legalese for this exact use. Also, it's technically more precise to leave some of the names and abbreviate it with "et al." rather than deleting the original details and replacing with some ambiguous group like "Geany developers" or "contributors". But again, I don't really care.

After reading some more about the topic, I tend to use one of the following:

`Copyright 20XX The Geany authors and contributors`

`Copyright 20XX The Geany contributors`

with replacing the year with the first year in the existing copyright notices (i.e. use the first "publication"). I tried to find good and authoritative examples of projects which already solved this but only found a wide variety of different copyright notices.

What I actually would like to remove are the names we currently have in the source files. I wasn't aware this is not strictly necessary legally and so never thought about it. As you stated, the detailed authorship of a file and even single code lines can be queried much more appropriate by the VCS.

https://opensource.com/law/14/2/copyright-statements-source-files has a nice explanation why author names are not a good idea in copyright notices: false implications by contributors thinking this is the authors' code or they need to add themselves for proper crediting and maybe more.

Copyright 20XX The Geany contributors

This one seems fine.

Here we go, I: - replaced individual copyright holders by "The Geany contributors" - removed everything but the initial copyright year - removed copyright notice and author names from README as the copyright is not necessary here and author names (and their email addresses) tend to outdate and be incomplete - skipped manually updating the translation files as the copyright string of the About dialog changed too much this time (I cannot translate "The Geany contributors" properly to zh_CN or hi :) - skipped anything in `ctags` and `scintilla` - am sorry for the huge diff :(

I have the po files regenerated already. What I meant in my comment was that now the translations for the copyright notice string in the About dialog is missing because it changed a lot and I skipped to guess the translations for all the different languages I do not know :). So, in short: there is nothing to do since the translators will probably update it within the next string freeze.

two merges of the PO files in quick succession

The updates in this PR should be safe, I mean, it's GIT :). And I intend to squash a bit anyway. In case you refer to the upcoming string freeze updates, I'm not concerned at all because I think we will merge this one before (I'd like just to wait for feedback from @codebrainz and/or @b4n). Even if, usually po files are easy to handle.

codebrainz approved this pull request.