The year in the MIT License year is not updated

[johlju]

I suggest we add another repeating task in Maintainers.md to update the year in the MIT license in each repo a maintainer is responsible for.

https://github.com/PowerShell/DscResources/blob/master/LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2015 Microsoft Corporation.

suggest it should be changed to

Copyright (c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation.

I verified to see if there been any changes in the text to the MIT license, but there is just a couple of rows where the line break is different. So the year is maybe the only thing that currently should be updated yearly.

This issue was submitted after Daniel Scott-Raynsford (@PlagueHO) found an error in the license file over at xCertificate.

[johlju]

Zachary Alexander (@zjalexander) can you check if this is something we shall do? If so I can send in a PR updating the Mainatiners.md.

[zjalexander]

we should update the year to be current when the code changes. The practice of updating the year should be a part of the guidelines. However, we don't need to update it if the code hasn't changed.

Other than that nitpick, yes, we should update mantainers.md.

[PlagueHO]

Cool. I'll raise an issue in each repo I work on to remind me to do this.

[ArieHein]

And in those that you don't work on ? ;)

I don't think you should be the one doing it, its the CI that runs at MS that builds the files before releasing it, that should add the 'updated" legal documents and if needed push the new file automatically to each repo.

Maybe I've just been 'burnt' by developers who don't really care that forced me to add steps in my Build CI to make sure all the information in AssemblyInfo.cs and NuGet packages are all the same and up-to-date with company policy, so products we publish don't cause us legal issues later.
But at least we get consistency across the board and not in specific products where the developers do care ;)

[PlagueHO]

Arie Heinrich (@ArieHein) - a fair point 😁

I'd definitely like to see the release process to the PSGallery take care of this. However, we'd need Zachary Alexander (@zjalexander) or Katie Kragenbrink (@kwirkykat) to tell us if this is possible and if it is something they would do?

We'd also want to check the actual (c) name itself. I've come across a couple of repos that are not "Microsoft Corporation", but are instead have the MIT license set to the name of the person who created the repo. E.g. 2015 Joe Bloggs.

[ArieHein]

Even more reason to centralize it from a template that is added to the repo externally and during build/release pipelines

[PlagueHO]

The MIT license would be OK as a template, but the (c) info in the module manifest will need to be updated using code. But that should be easy enough because the module version in the manifest gets updated during deployment to PS Gallery.

[johlju]

I await an answer on above before sending in a PR to change the Maintainers.md. If we should change the release pipeline so this is done during release, or change the Maintainers.md so maintainers update this information.

[zjalexander]

I get the argument for centralizing it into a build template but for something that needs touching literally once a year I think it's not really worth the effort of automation. I'll run it by Katie Kragenbrink (@kwirkykat) and see what her opinion is though.

[ArieHein]

Once a yesr * 100000 times for each resource and even outside the realm of DSC and even PS.
I would imagine something similar in other MS products when new code and documentation is release?