Copyright Year in license says 2024.

[longhirar]

Specifying the current year in the license is not legally required and may lead to unecessary maintenance.

A lot of well-known open-source projects have already removed the current year, such as:

• React (has no year at all),
• Visual Studio Code (has "2015 - present"), or
• Go (only lists the initial year of release).

I think we should consider rewriting it as "2018 - present", so that no more "update year" changes need to be made while preserving the initial release year.

[jan-ale]

but how will we know if it's public domain?

[rubyFeedback]

but how will we know if it's public domain?

The licence should cover this, that is a 2-clause BSD as can be seen here: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird?tab=readme-ov-file#license

To the topic: I suppose not having to update the year entry on a yearly basis is simpler, so appending " - present" is probably indeed the simplest option.

[jan-ale]

ladybird is not public domain currently, but after a long time it will be. it will be way easier to tell if the last year it was updated is in the license.

[ADKaster]

When the code goes into public domain will be at least 2113, which is 95 years after the first commit in the git history. I don't think that specifying "last date" is relevant to that question at all. But then I'm not a lawyer.

It's my understanding that updating the license year has no legal meaning, and is simply a convention.

Until and unless a lawyer representing some authors or representing the Ladybird Browser Initiative chimes in with a real reason to do anything different, I don't think it's worth the discussion time to change anything about how we edit the license.