From: Nikolai Weibull <mailing-lists.ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2005-05-12T07:59:47+09:00
Subject: [OT] Request for advice on applying a license

Hi!

So I’ve been thinking of licensing as of late and I have come to the
conclusion that I don’t know enough about licensing to make an informed
decision in chosing one, or how to apply one for that matter.  What I
basically want to know, is the GNU suggestion of including a thirteen
lines long license note and warranty waiver in every file belonging to a
given project a necessity, or are the GNU people just overly paranoid in
this regard?  I mean, if I include a LICENSE file in the root of a
project tree, is that enough to cover everything belonging to that
project?  I know Linus hates having overly verbose headers in his source
files and the Linux source follows this mantra.  Other project, however,
do put a full GNU license header in every file.  I have done the latter
for ages, without thinking much of it after having read about doing so
when I first applied the license.  I have, however, grown really tired
of seeing the line

  Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307 USA

in every file I open (especially now that they’re “moving” and I have to
change all of them) and would like to know if I can safely remove these
headers or not.  I know that some projects put in a line along the lines
(heh) of

  See the file "(COPYING|LICENSE)" for further information about the
  copyright and warranty status of this work.

Is this a possible solution, and can one do without those lines as well?

Finally, if one has to include some notification of the license that the
contents of a given file falls under, how much of it is needed?  Is the
warranty blurb needed?  Is the “get your copy here” blurb needed?

Thanks,
        nikolai

-- 
Nikolai Weibull: now available free of charge at http://bitwi.se/!
Born in Chicago, IL USA; currently residing in Gothenburg, Sweden.
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}