TL;DR: you don't actually need to update the copyright header on an ongoing basis.
We have two choices for the header: one is a more traditional form that lists the actual name of one or more companies (legal entities), and one that is more generic. It's really up to the initial contributor and project team to decide which one to use.
Eclipse MicroProfile was on the bleeding edge of some changes we needed to make in our recommendations regarding legal documentation. There's been some further refinements, and I believe that it's settled enough now that I'll starting to more broadly disseminate this (I'm also tweaking the handbook content).
For starters (this is mostly for Kevin), we thought that we'd be using an SPDX format for notice files and put MicroProfile on that path. We determined that that this was actually not desireable (or, in fact, the intent of the format), and so have changed the requirement to use a more standard human-readable (e.g. Markdown) format.
The IP Advisory Committee recently decided that we don't need to separately list copyright holders, but instead can just refer to the project's Git logs as the source of information regarding authors and--by extension--copyright holders (the copyright holder is very often the author's employer). We've decided to manifest this as a statement in the NOTICE file which should include pointers to the canonical source code repositories (see the link below for an example).
We also decided to follow the The US Copyright Office recommendation that copyright holders use copyright notices that include the year of first publication of the work. So, where we used to recommend a range of dates, it's now enough to just put the date of first publication and leave it at that. It's not wrong to include a date of the most recent contribution, but it's not required.
My understanding is that "All rights reserved" is legally meaningless. It's not strictly wrong to include it, it's just unnecessary.
I have an update to the Eclipse Project Handbook pending release either tomorrow or early next week. The information that's listed there is basically correct (except for the date range recommendation).
We have an experimental tool that generates templates for legal documentation:
We haven't added UI to change the project yet, so you have to change the id in the header to your project's id if you want it to, for example, pull up your project's description. It renders the NOTICE file as Markdown, because that's what we've observed that most people do. Any sort of human-readable format is acceptable.
It tends to do a reasonably good job, but if you notice anything that horribly, horribly wrong, let me know.
Wayne
