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FWIW Red Hat has legal advice that we can simply use: Copyright Red Hat in new files (I don't think this advice has been published). Personally I think the

• richardfontana 4y ago
  This is a pretty good public article on the topic of copyright notices in open source projects: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-in-open-source-software-projects https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-... although it doesn't explicitly address why the date can/should be omitted. The way I would put it: copyright notices in open source projects are typically not intended to function as formally (under US law) correct copyright notices, which do require a year. Rather, they serve different purposes for which the year is not necessary. And if you do include a year, the notice is likely to become inaccurate over time, which will make it formally invalid (under US law). That is not likely to be significant, but it makes inclusion of the year relatively pointless, in relation to the labor that would be involved in attempting to keep the year accurate.
• JohnFen 4y ago
  For source code documentation, I prefer to include an overt creation date and separate "last updated" date. Although version control makes including these in the actual source files redundant.