On 2026-06-16 08:57:46 -0400 (-0400), Theodore Tso wrote:
On Mon, Jun 15, 2026 at 08:29:49PM -0500, Jeremy Stanley wrote:Not to get pedantic, but if you *only* find a GPL-3 full text document in a repo without any indication in individual files as to how it applies to them, it may be entirely irrelevant anyway. As with a majority of popular free/libre open source licenses I've used, the instructions for applying it include indicators in the affected files. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html where it states that you should "Give each file the proper copyright notices. Make sure to clearly identify which versions of the license users can use."It is amazing to me how many people are playing armchair lawyer on this thread.
Apologies, I should have indicated that my opinion was not intended as legal advice (though it didn't dawn on me that anyone might mistake it for that).
It is what the GPL HOWTO states, yes. Whether that is necessary from a legal perspective depends on the legal jourisdiction and is a matter of legal advice. Most of us on the thread are not lawyers, and more importantly, even if we are lawyers, we are not *your* lawyer.Having attended a number of Linux Foundation Legal Summits, which gathers together general counsels from many of the top lawyers in the field, and having received specific guidance from my company's Open Source Office, whose guidance was informed by my company's lawyers, I will state that this is not my current practice, regardless of the FSF might suggest in their GPL HOWTO.
In no way did I mean call anyone's upstream licensing practices into question. My point was simply that if you come across a project that has a COPYING (or LICENSE or whatever) file in it with only the text of the license and no indication there or elsewhere in the project as to how that license is to be applied, then there is possible ambiguity and your options are to either guess upstream's intent or seek clarification from them.
A number of projects I'm involved with upstream have different parts covered by a variety of (compatible) licenses, and if we didn't indicate within those projects how the licenses relate to the other contents we'd leave our downstream consumers to draw potentially misleading conclusions, so we get rigorous about including license preambles in each file. In the case of a GPLv2+ project, we're able to state in the files themselves (and also elsewhere in documentation) that later versions of the license are also applicable, or in a GPLv2-only project that they're not applicable.
I also find the Linux kernel's approach of placing a clear statement about applicable licenses in its COPYING file helpfully unambiguous, for what my non-lawyer opinion's worth.
-- Jeremy Stanley
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