I need to preface this post with the statement that I am not a lawyer, and that I am not speaking on behalf of my dayjob employer.

There is no need to include the year in a copyright declaration statement. And related, there is no need to update the year statement, add new year statements, manage year range statements, or any of that stuff. It is tedious, boring, adds no value, and prevents no risks.

Several large legally sophisticated companies, include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, are now publishing open source code with copyright statements without a year.

And so, I have added the following to our devel/hacking document.

Do not specify a year in a copyright statement. Most of the existing copyright statements already present in the project have been scrubbed of the year. There is no need to specify the year in a copyright statement. Several large legally sophisticated companies, include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, are now publishing open source code with copyright statements without a year. We encourage the larger open source community to emulate this.

Being able to do this now has taken a surprisingly large amount of work behind the scenes, especially on the part of those large companies. Do please take advantage of it, and write simpler copyright statements in your open source projects from now on.