Gergo Tisza <[email protected]> wrote:

> In a recent blog post ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6867 ) ESR writes:

> High on my list of Things That Annoy Me When I Hack is sourcefiles that
>> contain huge blobs of license text at the top. That is valuable territory
>> which should be occupied by a header comment explaining the code, not a
>> boatload of boilerplate that I’ve seen hundreds of times before.

> ...and then goes on to explain using SPDX identifiers to refer to licenses,
> which would look something like this:

> /* Copyright 2015 by XYZ
>  * SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
>  */

> Any objections to making that the new standard / replacing existing blocks
> with this? It would make the PHP files a little more readable.

The GPL explicitly recommends
(cf. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl#howto):

| […]

| To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is
| safest to attach them to the start of each source file to
| most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each
| file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer
| to where the full notice is found.

|     <one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
|     Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>
|
|     This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
|     it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
|     the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
|     (at your option) any later version.
|
|     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
|     but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
|     MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
|     GNU General Public License for more details.
|
|     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
|     along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

| […]

I don't see a good reason to deviate from the licence cre-
ator's advice.  Source code files in any language will al-
ways have recurring elements which will be uninteresting to
someone who needs to read or edit /other/ parts of them.

Tim


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