copyright: bump to 2025

[plowsof]

Happy new year! 😺

From an external runflow @ https://github.com/plowsof/copyCat/actions/runs/12565549101

[tobtoht]

I wanted to mention that I've seen other projects change their copyright headers in source files to <YEAR>-present. This way they don't have to be updated annually.

See e.g.: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/test/fuzz/txorphan.cpp#L1

[iamamyth]

As the topic of annual, noisy commits has yet again reared its head, I suggest seriously considering #8698 (comment)

[jeffro256]

I agree with @iamamyth. NACK large automated copyright year changes without any real legal justification

[tobtoht]

Here are some examples of what big corporations with lawyers who ought to know about this stuff have come up with:

• Facebook:
  • react: no year in copyright header (MIT).
  • docusaurus: no year in copyright header (MIT)
  • rocksdb: no year in copyright header (GPLv2)
• Google:
  • levelsdb: year of file creation (BSD-3)
  • googletest: year of file creation (BSD-3)
  • protobuf: year of file creation (BSD-3)
• Microsoft:
  • vscode: no year in copyright header (MIT)
  • PowerToys: no year in copyright header (MIT)
  • TypeScript: no copyright header in files (Apache 2.0)
• Apple:
  • ml-stable-diffusion: year of file creation (MIT)
  • foundationdb: <year> of creation - <year> of last edit (Apache 2.0)
  • pkl: <year> of creation - <year> of last edit (Apache 2.0)

Facebook has used <year> - present in the past, but no longer follows this practice, suggesting this might not be a 'valid' legal option, see also.

In the interest of avoiding force-pushes due to forgotten copyright header updates (which waste dev time and CI runs) and not making life any more difficult for new contributors, I heavily favor any option that does not involve manually updating copyright headers.

[tobtoht]

I think omitting the year in source files and referring to the LICENSE file is the least cumbersome approach.

Some variations:

// Copyright (c) The Monero Project
//
// This source code is licensed under the BSD-3 license found in the
// LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.

// Copyright (c) The Monero Project
// Licensed under the BSD-3 License. See LICENSE in the project root for license information.

// Copyright (c) The Monero Project
// Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file. 

// Copyright (c) The Monero Project
// Distributed under the BSD-3 software license, see the accompanying file LICENSE.

// This file is part of The Monero Project which is released under BSD-3.
// See file LICENSE for full license details.

[iamamyth]

In my opinion, which is not and should not be construed as legal advice, the first variation seems the most intelligible, and also most closely matches the Linux license seen here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/cgroup/cgroup.c. Crucially, like with Linux, there are files in this project which have multiple sources, each with their own copyright, so an auto-change tool needs take care not to drop information. As a bonus, referencing a single license file will clean up the spaces at EOL in the existing template, which anger my editor and offend all principles of computer science.