George Russell seems to imply that the only purpose of a license is to
protect the copyright holder's rights:
>The is a drag; I suspect it could in fact be dispensed with in
>most though sadly not all of the civilised world, where the presence of
>a "LICENSE" file in all distributions, or indeed nothing at all, will
>secure automatic legal copyright protection. Of course if your lawyers
>insist I suppose it has to be there .
as George suspects, in most of the civilized world, if there is no
explicit license, the "default" license applies: "unless you obtain
permission from the copyright holder, you may not distribute to other
people modified or unmodified versions of this code. you may not use
code snippets from this program in your program."
this "default" license "protects" the copyright owner very well, but
fails to protect the investment in time and attention of the people who
download the software and invest time reading the source code or
learning to use the program. open-source licenses have become popular
largely because they protect the user's investment better. (perhaps
they favor users too much.)
the first thing I do after downloading software is look for the license.
if I do not find a license, usually I just delete the software. if the
software is compelling, I might write the author and ask him to place
the software under an open-source license. if he will not do that, then
the software would have to be truly exceptional, or small enough for me
easily to rewrite it from scratch, for me to spend time on it.
if you want to recoup the costs of your writing a program, then charge
money for it. if you decide not to try to recoup your costs, then
please include an explicit license (like the GPL, the LGPL, or the BSD
license) that gives your users permission to share with each other
modified versions of the program. (for more info, see opensource.org,
gnu.org, news:gnu.misc.discuss.)
(I have no opinion whether that license should go into an XML
element or a separate file.)
