As you can see the ChangeLog shown below, in version 1.5 the maintainer mistakenly changed the copyright holder from Andrew Moore to the FSF. In versions 1.6 and 1.11 he tried to fix the mistake, but he forgot to restore the original COPYING, which he have done now in 1.18.

Therefore, in addition to changing the LICENSE field from GPLv3 + to GPLv2 , should I add relevant information in the commit?

2010-08-30 Antonio Diaz Diaz <ant_diaz@...>
* Version 1.5 released.
* Change copyright holder from Andrew, Antonio to the FSF.
(This change was later discovered to be wrong. See 1.6 and 1.11).

2012-01-01 Antonio Diaz Diaz <ant_diaz@...>

* Version 1.6 released.
* Restore copyright notices of Andrew L. Moore. It seems Andrew
granted some permissions but never assigned copyright to the FSF.

2015-03-30 Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio@...>

* Version 1.11 released.
* Restore original copyright and license notices in the code. I
assigned to the FSF the copyright on changes made to the part of ed
already copyrighted by the FSF, which seems to be just the manual.

2022-02-04 Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio@...>
* Version 1.18 released.
* COPYING: Restored. (I forgot to do it in 1.11).

-----Original Message-----
From: Alexander Kanavin <alex.kanavin@...>
Sent: Tuesday, February 8, 2022 6:25 PM
To: Wang, Mingyu/王 鸣瑜 <wangmy@...>
Cc: OE-core <openembedded-core@...>
Subject: Re: [OE-core] [PATCH] ed: upgrade 1.17 -> 1.18

On Tue, 8 Feb 2022 at 09:26, wangmy <wangmy@...> wrote:

License-Update:
year updated to 2022.
license changed from GNU3 to GNU2.
LICENSE = "GPLv3+"
-LIC_FILES_CHKSUM =

"file://COPYING;md5=0c7051aef9219dc7237f206c5c4179a7 \

-

file://ed.h;endline=20;md5=b72aa5eaafef318c6bfc37f858469113 \

-

file://main.c;endline=17;md5=2c93e24f4db3528a00a24c7df5618e41 \

+LIC_FILES_CHKSUM =

"file://COPYING;md5=76d6e300ffd8fb9d18bd9b136a9bba13 \

+

file://ed.h;endline=20;md5=6e6a818b0593f937fc63ba08d5e314bf \

+
+file://main.c;endline=17;md5=8419a08bb12936f32384a0d1c0f9e74c \

If the license changed, you need to update the LICENSE field. Also a bit
more research would be appreciated: can you find and link the commit
where the change occurred?

Alex