Re: The GPL: No shelter for the Linux kernel?

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

Basically, yes. There's nothing to really say that you need to state your copyright license in every individual file, especially if those files are only ever distributed as a whole, together with other things (which souce code obviously is - you generally cannot even use an individual *.c file without the infrastructure it was written for).

If a file doesn't have a license mentioned, it doesn't mean that it's "free for all" or not copyrighted, it just means that you need to find out what the license is some other way (and if you can't find out, you shouldn't be copying that file ;)

Of course, for clarity, a lot of projects end up adding at least a minimal copyright header license everywhere, just to cover their *sses. It's not required, but maybe it avoids some confusion, especially if that file is later copied into some other project with other basic rules (but if you do that, you really _should_ have added the information at that point!).

Me personally, I prefer to not see huge boiler-plate licenses at the top of the file, so that every time I open a new file I just see the dang license that has nothing to do with why I'm opening it. So I tend to do a fairly minimal thing ("Copyright (C) Linus Torvalds 2006" or similar) but sometimes I drop even that (ie I personally feel silly adding a copyright message to a header file, so I usually don't - and sometimes I just forget about it in real source files too)..

Others are more anal^H^H^H^Hcareful, and tend to add a few lines to tell what the license is, the ubiqutous "all rights reserved" (which is just idiocy), and a blinking gif advertisement for their company. Oh, and the "no warranty" clause. And an aphorism or two.

In other words, I don't think there are any real rules. Different people and different projects have more or less different rules. If you expect to collect treble damages in the US, you might want to add a copyright notice just about everywhere, "just in case", and to "show you really care".

IANAL, of course.

			Linus