On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 9:43 AM Harald Sitter <sit...@kde.org> wrote: > > do we really need it? > > systemd for example only has a spdx license header, resulting in much > tidier file headers. > > I entirely fail to understand why we need to slap a FileCopyrightText > on files. The copyright surely applies whether or not I put the > FileCopyrightText there. The list is also just about always > incomplete, further calling its use into question. Not to mention that > it is annoying book keeping of information that is already available > in git. > > Can someone shed some light on this? >
It is part of REUSE/SPDX policy for handling attribution. The name of this label is misleading, but what it does is important. The systemd project's adoption of SPDX-License-Identifier mimicked the Linux kernel's pattern, but the Linux kernel did not drop the rest of the header. That said, as a systemd contributor, I refused to have my attribution statements erased from the files I substantially contributed to, so they stand today in the sources. I will also note that I am not a fan of REUSE overall, but I'm even less of a fan of dropping attribution from sources. -- 真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!