docs: remove (dynamic) years from copyright #58
Merged
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Setting copyright programatically to a range up to datetime.today() is legally dubious. It effectively signals that the copyright changes/extends whenever a downstream (perhaps even not holding no copyright of their own) builds the documentation, rather than when the code was authored. I do not believe this to be the case in any jurisdiction.
Rather than replace it with a static year (2023 currently) and then keep updating it on a yearly basis, remove the years altogether, as they serve little purpose: the dates are readily available through git, changelogs, PyPI etc. This follows what other projects have done or are in the process of doing as well; for example, see:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-years/
https://hynek.me/til/copyright-years/
As a side-effect and primary motivation for this commit, this resolves a rather small build reproducibility (FTBR) issue, where builds in different years would yield different outputs.