New subject: Short license blocks

27 Oct 2015

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Gergo for bringing up this issue.  Everyone has raised good
points and I just want to link to existing guidance from the Software
Freedom Law Center
<https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html>
on
best practices for developers to address the problem of long license and
copyright headers by linking to external files.   As noted in the guidance
document, by referencing the appropriate information files located in a
centralized location, not only do we reduce clutter in the header but we
also increase maintainability of license and copyright info.

Therefore for the header, as an example, we could have something like this:

...

 This file is part of the MediaWiki Project.  Copyright 2015 The MediaWiki
 Project Developers.

 For full copyright information and for the licensing terms governing the
 project and all its files, see the COPYING file at the top-level directory
 of this distribution and at
 https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/COPYING. 

where in turn the COPYING file could contain references to the updated list
of authors, a description of the project, and the licensing information.

As to the specifics of SPDX use for all our projects and licenses, we will
have to do a little more research on this.  Happy to talk off-thread about
this as well.

Thanks,

Zhou

...
  From: Tyler Romeo &lt;tylerromeo(a)gmail.com&gt;
 Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:03 PM
 Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks
 To: Wikimedia developers &lt;wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;

 The Apache license, which is also permissive, has a similar recommended
 file header.

 I'd say we just standardize on having the warranty disclaimer and license
 notice in every file. It's an easy approach to make sure somebody reading
 the file can easily tell the license without having to maintain
 comprehensive authorship information in every file.
 On Oct 27, 2015 14:17, "Ryan Kaldari" &lt;rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

  I was saying that we could go ahead and make this
the standard for  non-GPL
  MediaWiki code (basically, the few MIT licensed
extensions). I'm not sure
 if the advantage of doing that would outweigh the disadvantage of having  a
  non-standard standard though.

 On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:06 AM, Tyler Romeo &lt;tylerromeo(a)gmail.com&gt;
 wrote:

 > Are you saying adopting the short license blocks? Or the MIT license?
 > Because I'm not sure how the licenses of extensions would affect the
 > license headers in core.
 > On Oct 27, 2015 12:43, "Ryan Kaldari" &lt;rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
wrote:
 >
 > > <flamebait>
 > > I totally support switching to license identifiers instead of  headers,
  > > provided that we also switch our
licensing from GPL to MIT or BSD ;)
 > > </flamebait>
 > >
 > > On a serious note, we do have a fair number of extensions that are  MIT
  > > Licensed and could go ahead and adopt
this (
 > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:MIT_licensed_extensions).
 > >
 > >
 > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 3:44 AM, Gergo Tisza &lt;gtisza(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
 > wrote:
 > >
 > > > In a recent blog post ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6867 ) ESR 
writes:
   >
>
 > > High on my list of Things That Annoy Me When I Hack is sourcefiles  that
   > >
contain huge blobs of license text at the top. That is valuable
 territory
 > > which should be occupied by a header comment explaining the code,  not a
  > > boatload of boilerplate that I’ve seen
hundreds of times before.
 >
 >
 > ...and then goes on to explain using SPDX identifiers to refer to
 licenses,
 > which would look something like this:
 >
 > /* Copyright 2015 by XYZ
 >  * SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
 >  */
 >
 > Any objections to making that the new standard / replacing existing
 blocks
 > with this? It would make the PHP files a little more readable.
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-- 

Zhou Zhou
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
zzhou(a)wikimedia.org

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