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

Russell Bryant rbryant at redhat.com
Wed Feb 5 17:08:45 UTC 2014


On 02/05/2014 11:53 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 04:29:20PM +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.  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.
> 
> It is not uncommon for source from one project to be copied into another
> project in either direction. While the licenses of the two projects have
> to be compatible, they don't have to be the same. It is highly desirable
> that each file have license explicitly declared to remove any level of
> ambiguity as to what license its code falls under. This might not seem
> like a problem now, but code lives for a very long time and what is
> clear today might be not be so clear 10, 15, 20 years down the road.
> Distros like Debian and Fedora who audit project license compliance have
> learnt the hard way that you really want these per-file licenses for
> clarity of intent.

Yes, this.  :-)

-- 
Russell Bryant



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