On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Richard Fontana <rfontana@redhat.com> wrote:

If the license notice remains in the file, this mitigates the concern
that having no legal information in a source file could lead to one of
two bad future events if a source file ends up being indirectly taken
out of context by some other project: either the project is too afraid
to use the code because of unclear licensing, or the project will
assume it's 'public domain' with no conditions attached.

Note that this is not a hypothetical problem for many downstream consumers; it turns out that when you tell people "I want you to use my code" they do that, and then other people do further downstream, and then when they want to comply with your license they get very confused :)

I wrote about this somewhat at length a few years ago:

http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/03/17/on-the-importance-of-per-file-license-information/

So if I understand Richard correctly, I think his suggested approach is right: per-file *license* information, but not per-file information about copyright holders/authors (except perhaps a generic "copyright by the contributors" statement).

Luis