[darcs-users] Licensing and copyright fun.

[Trent W. Buck]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 11:38:54AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Trent W. Buck writes:
> 
>  > Hmm, apparently what's important is that licensing is UNAMBIGUOUS. 
> 
> A better word is *explicit*.  The terms might intentionally be
> ambiguous, as in "GPL version 2 or any later version as published by
> the Free Software Foundation".
> 
>  > The BEST way to do this is by adding a declaration to each file, 
>  > but conceivably we could have a file in the top directory simply 
>  > saying "unless otherwise specified, all files in this repository 
>  > are licensed under the terms of GPL2 or higher, with <the openssl 
>  > exception>."
> 
> This is a bad idea, as it is likely that downstream users of *part* of
> the work will be lazy, and in this way those parts will become
> separated from the relevant licensing language.

I agree; I'd definitely prefer explicit copyright and license
declarations at the top of each file.  There seemed to be a lot of
aversion to this in #darcs (IRC), so I added the postscript above.