On 05/15/2013 06:51 AM, David Ripton wrote:
I'm not generally advocating removing copyright statements from source files. If the author(s) put them in, then it's (at least) rude to take them out without permission, and getting permission from thousands of contributors would be a pain.
But there's one particular case that drives me nuts. We have source code files that contain _only_ a copyright statement, and no actual content to assert copyright over. (I'm not talking about NOTICE files that exist to hold copyright statements; I'm talking about zero-byte __init__.py files that exist to mark a directory as a Python package.) You can't copyright a zero-byte file; there's no original creative content there. And, because the copyright blurb makes the file's size nonzero, people waste time reading it to look for code.
Anyone object to me emptying source files that contain no code, just copyright statements and boilerplate vim/emacs comments?
I do not object to that.