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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?

-- 
David Ripton   Red Hat   dripton at redhat.com