On 2011-02-23, Michael Herndon wrote: > I'm curious about the practice of putting license information into all > files. The reasoning and etc.
> Is due to legal reasons or is it due to good practices? would providing > short copyright info and relative path to the license suffice or is the full > license required? The notice you put at the top of each file *is* the short notice 8-) Just compare it with the full license text. > Has not doing so cause issues/legal cases in the past? > This will probably be good information for other developers to know in > general as well. For background on the existing policies: <http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html> In the past (Apache Software License 1.1) we used to put the full text (which was way shorter than the 2.0 license) into each file. One reason that we need to put it into each file is that we may be combining our code and contributions under a different license into a combined work and need to mark those where the Apache Software License applies. Another is that people looking at the code for a single file will know immediately about its license. Note that the ASF only holds the copyright for the distribution as a whole (the combined work) and not for the individual files. Each contributor retains copyright of her/his own work and grants the ASF a license to redistribute it (via the ICLA). Stefan
