[openstack-dev] why do we put a license in every file?

Jay Pipes jaypipes at gmail.com
Wed Feb 5 16:46:57 UTC 2014


On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 16:29 +0000, Greg Hill wrote:
> 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.

Meh, probably just habit and copy/paste behavior.

>   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.

Agreed, and the git history is enough to figure out who worked on a
particular file. But, there's been many discussions about this topic
over the years, and it's just not been a priority, frankly.

> Github even has the capacity to choose a license and generate that file for you, it's neat.

True, but we don't use GitHub :) We only only use it as a mirror for
Gerrit.

Best,
-jay




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