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Excerpts from Greg Hill's message of 2014-02-05 08:29:20 -0800:
> 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. 
> 

I am definitely not a lawyer, but this is what my reading has shown.

In legal terms, explicit trumps implicit. So being explicit about
our license in each copyrightable file is a hedge against somebody
forklifting the code into their own code base in a proprietary product
and just removing the license. If the header were not there, they might
have a mitigating argument that they were not aware of the license. But
by removing it, they've actively subverted the license.

In reality, I think it is because Debian Developers like me whine when
our program 'licensecheck' says "UNKNOWN" for any files. ;)