Proposal: new standard to avoid copyright+license header comment blocks

[obnoxxx]

copyright-and-license comment headers

generl observations

Most open source software projects follow a standard of adding to each source file (including scripts) a comment header block with a copyright disclaimer and license text.

Many FOSS licenses even recommend or requite the addition of these comments.
Example(GPL): gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html#copyright-disclaimer.

habits in our SINK projects

The projects in our SINK organization are either licensed Apache 2.0 or GPL v3.0 and they follow the standard at least partially in that in most of our repos the source files except for most shell scripts have a license header but most don't have a copyright disclaimer.

proposal: do not use copyright+license headers

What I am proposing here is that we adopt a new standard of not having copyright-and-license headers in our source files.

reasoning

I am proposing the new standard because I think that the comment headers are not adding any value
and more specifically are even redundant:

• Having and maintaining a copyright line with Author(s) and years in each file creates unnecessary extra work: This information is conveniently available in the git history of the corresponding file
• Copying the license text into each source file is redundant because each repo contains a LICENSE file in the main directory which applies to all files in the repo. So copying the license into source files only duplicates information.

precedent

While many open source licenses encourage or even require the use of these headers (Like the GPL), one counter-example is the Apache license. The Apache foundation for instance asks projects to not add copyrigh+license comment header blocks: https://www.apache.org/legal/apply-license.html#contributor-copyright

This s only mentioned as an example and precedent to illustrate that not all FOSS licenses require the headers. The relevance to our projects is limited sins most are not Apache licensed (And we are not part of the Apache foundation.

TODOs for adopting the new standard.

Adopting this new standard would require that we:

• stop adding these comment headers to newly added files.
• remove headers from existing files.

[obnoxxx]

This had first been suggested here: samba-in-kubernetes/sambacc#154 (review)

[obnoxxx]

As no opinion has been added here and reactions I got offline seem to be mostly against it, I'm closing this discussion.