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How to handle different sets of copyright holder lines? #101
Description
How do you suggest handling different lists of copyright holders and/or dates in different files? For example, suppose the main LICENSE and template tries to capture the union of all contributors - an example based on that from #64:
Copyright © 2023-2024 John Doe <john@example.com>
Copyright © 2020-2022 Steve Luamo <steve@luamo.com>
Copyright © 2015-2022 Leve Stuamo <leve@stuamo.com>
Some of the project files might match the above perfectly - the easy case. However, the project might have some new code files just by John:
Copyright © 2023-2024 John Doe <john@example.com>
But there could be some static files which John has not edited which are only copyright by the original team, e.g.
Copyright © 2015-2017 Leve Stuamo <leve@stuamo.com>
Leaving aside #64 on which lines if any need updating with --use-current-year, is there anyway to handle this gracefully in this hook?
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peterjc commentedon Sep 2, 2024
I can think of a partial workaround based on excluding multiple copyright holder lines from the license block being checked - leaving none, or a single umbrella entry.
For example, if all the contributors work for the same employer, that body is likely the actual copyright holder and you just have date-variants of
Copyright © 2023-2024 The Companyto worry about.This idea also works if you can name the contributors collectively from the point of view of the license header (perhaps supplemented by a list of names and dates above/below the automatically checked license block), e.g.
Copyright © 2023-2024 The Project Contributors.If there are just a couple of named entities involved, you might be able to solve this with multiple license templates (e.g. one file with
Copyright © 2015-2022 The Start-Up Company, one file withCopyright © 2023-2024 John Doe Sole-Trader, and one file with both). This won't scale though.If this use-case is common, perhaps we need some kind of
<AUTHOR-LINE>or<COPYRIGHT-HOLDER>wildcard within the license block template?Lucas-C commentedon Dec 5, 2025
In the past I successfully defined several
insert-licensehooks in a.pre-commit-config.yamlfile: maybe that could cover your use case?peterjc commentedon Dec 5, 2025
Did you mean different hooks for different files, covering different pools of authors? Or just different template licenses with different pools of authors. That might work for small teams but doesn't scale.
The only simple solution (if the project members agree) is a consistent copyright line in the license header, eg
Copyright (c) 2020-2025, The Project XXX Contributors.On the project linked above we used a standardised 'corporate' copyright of
Copyright (c) 2024-2025 University of Strathclydebut with the project funding over all recent and future changes will by default be copyright by a pool of authors, so perhaps we'll useCopyright (c) 2024-2025 University of Strathclyde and external contributorsor similar in future.i.e. Social rather than technical solutions to the automated license check.