The devil is in the details

I’m a very detail oriented person and one of the things that annoys me in reading code is something like this in header files:

Copyright 2010 __MyCompanyName__. All rights reserved.

There are numerous posts including this one that tell you how to change this by default. However, you can change it on a per project basis in Xcode by setting the organization. While many may consider this minor, the question I have to ask is “what else did the developer miss?”. This kind of detail is one of the reasons I’ve been quite good at reviewing code and finding issues.

I’ve seen this mistake made in commercial projects as well as open source projects. Do people look at the code when they first create a file? While we’re at it, when I create a file, I make sure the copyright is set to whoever really owns the source; when I’ve done contract work, the source is always owned by the client, so I make sure it is set. About 70% of the code I’ve seen has had the wrong copyright. Most people don’t care about this, but if push comes to shove, I don’t want to be in the middle of someone trying to determine who owns the code.

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