Excerpts from Greg Hill's message of 2014-02-05 08:29:20 -0800: > I'm new, so I'm sure there's some history I'm missing, but I find it bizarre > that we have to put the same license into every single file of source code in > our projects. In my past experience, a single LICENSE file at the root-level > of the project has been sufficient to declare the license chosen for a > project. Github even has the capacity to choose a license and generate that > file for you, it's neat. >
I am definitely not a lawyer, but this is what my reading has shown. In legal terms, explicit trumps implicit. So being explicit about our license in each copyrightable file is a hedge against somebody forklifting the code into their own code base in a proprietary product and just removing the license. If the header were not there, they might have a mitigating argument that they were not aware of the license. But by removing it, they've actively subverted the license. In reality, I think it is because Debian Developers like me whine when our program 'licensecheck' says "UNKNOWN" for any files. ;) _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
