From: Rick DeNatale Date: 2009-09-04T04:33:50+09:00 Subject: Re: What licensing info is needed in code headers? On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Fabian Streitel wrote: > same goes for Germany. The problem is AFAIK that the US have a very > different > copyright system than most (all?) European countries. (don't nail me on > anything here, > I'm not a lawyer...) Actually, the US has adhered to the Berne convention since 1989, so strictly speaking marking a work as copyright isn't required to claim copyright, however doing so give better protection should things end up in court. > > I can only speak for myself here, don't know what's good practice. I usually > only provide > the LICENSE file, but then again, I allow people to use the code > unconditonally anyways. > I'd say, if you have something that needs special protection (like you just > invented a working > AI with emotions in 200 lines of code), put it everywhere, just to be sure > ;-). But when > it's just regular code: why bother too much? There's a difference between a license and a copyright. Copyright allows the author to restrict copying without permission, the license grants that permission. A license without the copyrights is dubious because it's not clear if the licensor actually has control over the rights the license grants. Many open-source projects skip on placing copyright notices in the source files, this can be problematical, particularly in the case of a multi-author project which grew semi-organically when the project 'shepherds' want to change the license and need to track down the actual copyright holders to get the needed permissions. -- Rick DeNatale Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale