I'm working with a formerly closed-source project whose official first release under that product name was in 1997. Development on it slowed and was abandoned, then released as Apache 2.0 in 2012. The copyright dates in the file headers of that open source publication said:
Copyright 2012 PROJECT Corp. PROJECT is a trademark of PROJECT Corp. Licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 (the "License"): you may not use this file except in compliance with the license... blah blah blah PROJECT Corp has not really been involved in the development since the open source release, but others have. Requests to PROJECT Corp for involvement and/or support have been largely unheeded. I was considering changing this to:
Copyright 1997-2012 PROJECT Corp. Copyright 2012-2015 Project Open Source Contributors (see CREDITS.md) PROJECT is a trademark of PROJECT Corp. Licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 (the "License"): you may not use this file except in compliance with the license... blah blah blah My question is about not refreshing their copyright date to read Copyright 1997-2015. I feel it's more accurate to convey the date ranges of involvement with the source by not updating it. But additionally, I wonder if I would even be authorized to do it on their behalf.
I'm not trying to make PROJECT Corp mad--they may not even want to be associated with the derived code anyway! But the codebase does have active developers who want to keep the file headers current.