From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-09-03T02:07:51+09:00
Subject: Re: What licensing info is needed in code headers?

On 2 Sep 2009, at 17:44, Shot (Piotr Szotkowski) wrote:
> Disclaimer: I know that some of you live in jurisdictions that do not
> allow you to give legal adivce, and I’m not seeking it – I’m merely
> asking for a good practice. :)
>
> I like my code as clean as possible, and so I’d love to have my code  
> to
> have as little cruft as possible. Given that I say in the README file
> that the code is licensed under a given licence (located in the  
> LICENCE
> file), do I have to add licensing info to each and every file anyway?
> If so, what’s the shortest info I can add to make sure that a given  
> file
> is covered by the licence?

I can't comment for other jurisdictions, but in the UK you don't need  
to put anything in your source files. Copyright exists from the moment  
of creation regardless of whether it is claimed (although including  
the usual (c) copyright statement is always a good idea). Likewise if  
you license some of the rights attendant from copyright to a third  
party, you're under no compunction to explicitly do so in your source  
code.

Setting aside those jurisdictional specifics, it's common practice  
amongst OSS developers to include the (c) copyright statement in  
individual source files along with a separate LICENSE file outlining  
the terms under which the source code is licensed.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
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raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason