http://invisible-island.net/ded/
Copyright © 2011-2014,2017 by Thomas E. Dickey

Synopsis

Copyrite selectively comments source-files to prepend a copyright notice.

History

I started writing this tool in December 1991. The reason for writing it was to ensure that each file in a series of prototypes were all marked with copyright notices.

There were some obvious restrictions:

• the notice would be added as a comment, not affecting operation of the program.
• if there was already a copyright notice from another owner, no change would be made.

Influence

There are no direct influences either way.

However, it gave me insight for writing similar tools for specific projects. Those have been usually scripts written in Perl. For instance, when I applied FSF copyright notices to ncurses in 1998, I wrote a script for this, which recognized the different filetypes, and applied the notice to everything which had an RCS identifier.

My practice for ncurses follows the guidelines used for this tool.

Also, thinking about the issues involved made me more aware of abuses in this technical area. For instance, it is common for developers to "update" copyright notices without noticing whether the files have changed recently.

Changes

• plain text
• changes with links...

Documentation

• copyrite (pdf) (postscript) (plain text)

Download

Download via ftp (you'll need the library):

• td_lib source (gzip'd tar)
• copyrite source (gzip'd tar)

Download via http (you'll need the library):

• td_lib source (gzip'd tar)
• copyrite source (gzip'd tar)