Open Stack

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.

Regards,
Daniel
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