Hi list

For a fairly long time I've been meaning for us to clean up our
license headers. They're currently all over the place - some files not
displaying the proper license, etc.

As I was saying yesterday on IRC, what matters (unless *explicitly
specified*) is the license of the project, as specified in the
AUTHORS/COPYING/README file.

To restore the order, I suggested a short, global license header which
would apply to *all* files and never change. It doesn't specify
copyright years, authors, anything like that - just redirects to an
AUTHORS file for authorship, and a LICENSE file for license text.

This is something we've looked into and put in action previously for
the Pootle project. The *GPL license header is there to identify the
license for standalone distributed files. As most of our files in all
our projects are completely irrelevant standalone, we can explicitly
direct onlookers to other files without spelling everything out in the
file itself.

This is the current proposal for the license header:

/*
* Copyright (c) LXQt contributors.
*
* This file is part of the LXQt project. <http://lxqt.org>
* It is distributed under the LGPL 2.1 or later license.
* Please refer to the LICENSE file for a copy of the license, and
* the AUTHORS file for copyright and authorship information.
*/

An initial PR, affecting just lxqt-about, was filed by @agaida here:
  https://github.com/lxde/lxqt-about/pull/12

Please leave any comments, objections or +1s you may have there. If
you are a core contributor to LXQt please consider this a request,
it's important to have everybody's greenlight on this and we'd like to
land it asap (and in 0.10).

As a personal note, this is a practice I'd like to see other projects
adopt. License headers are an ugly, unnecessary mess. They tend to be
outdated very quickly and are more often than not misleading. Shorter,
cleaner license headers that do not need to be updated are better for
everybody.

J. Leclanche

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