[QGIS-Developer] Copyright headers in source code?

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 05/07/2017 12:15 PM, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
> Maybe this has been raised before, but do we really need all the copyright
> header stuff in the source files?

Yes, because this allows downstream distributors to review the license
copyright for the individual sources. The copyright for each file is not
the same as for the whole work, they have different copyright holders
and associated lifetime.

> If they needed to make a source release
> they could be added using a script.

A script will not be able to determine whether the last change was
copyrightable (to set the copyright years and holders appropriately).

> I find it just fluff that clutters the files when I can't really see much
> need.  We already have the licence file for the whole project and git
> blame/log can tell you the history of the file.

git is not an option for users of the tarball release.

> I'm ok to leave them but also would be happy to see them go just to remove
> fluff we don't need.

Please leave them, and take licensing and copyright more seriously. In
case you don't care about copyright and Free Software licenses make all
your contributions in the public domain (using CC-0) to make this explicit.

Kind Regards,

Bas

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