Hi everyone, Thanks to Gergo for bringing up this issue. Everyone has raised good points and I just want to link to existing guidance from the Software Freedom Law Center <https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html> on best practices for developers to address the problem of long license and copyright headers by linking to external files. As noted in the guidance document, by referencing the appropriate information files located in a centralized location, not only do we reduce clutter in the header but we also increase maintainability of license and copyright info.
Therefore for the header, as an example, we could have something like this: > > This file is part of the MediaWiki Project. Copyright 2015 The MediaWiki > Project Developers. > > For full copyright information and for the licensing terms governing the > project and all its files, see the COPYING file at the top-level directory > of this distribution and at > https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/COPYING. where in turn the COPYING file could contain references to the updated list of authors, a description of the project, and the licensing information. As to the specifics of SPDX use for all our projects and licenses, we will have to do a little more research on this. Happy to talk off-thread about this as well. Thanks, Zhou > From: Tyler Romeo <[email protected]> > Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:03 PM > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks > To: Wikimedia developers <[email protected]> > > > The Apache license, which is also permissive, has a similar recommended > file header. > > I'd say we just standardize on having the warranty disclaimer and license > notice in every file. It's an easy approach to make sure somebody reading > the file can easily tell the license without having to maintain > comprehensive authorship information in every file. > On Oct 27, 2015 14:17, "Ryan Kaldari" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I was saying that we could go ahead and make this the standard for > non-GPL > > MediaWiki code (basically, the few MIT licensed extensions). I'm not sure > > if the advantage of doing that would outweigh the disadvantage of having > a > > non-standard standard though. > > > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:06 AM, Tyler Romeo <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > > Are you saying adopting the short license blocks? Or the MIT license? > > > Because I'm not sure how the licenses of extensions would affect the > > > license headers in core. > > > On Oct 27, 2015 12:43, "Ryan Kaldari" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > <flamebait> > > > > I totally support switching to license identifiers instead of > headers, > > > > provided that we also switch our licensing from GPL to MIT or BSD ;) > > > > </flamebait> > > > > > > > > On a serious note, we do have a fair number of extensions that are > MIT > > > > Licensed and could go ahead and adopt this ( > > > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:MIT_licensed_extensions). > > > > > > > > > > > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 3:44 AM, 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. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > > > > [email protected] > > > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > > > [email protected] > > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > _______________________________________________ > > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > > [email protected] > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > -- Zhou Zhou Legal Counsel Wikimedia Foundation 149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor San Francisco, CA 94105 [email protected] NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged information in it. 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