Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> 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.
The GPL explicitly recommends
(cf.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl#howto):
| […]
| To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is
| safest to attach them to the start of each source file to
| most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each
| file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer
| to where the full notice is found.
| <one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
| Copyright (C) <year> <name of author>
|
| This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
| it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
| the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
| (at your option) any later version.
|
| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
| GNU General Public License for more details.
|
| You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
| along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
| […]
I don't see a good reason to deviate from the licence cre-
ator's advice. Source code files in any language will al-
ways have recurring elements which will be uninteresting to
someone who needs to read or edit /other/ parts of them.
Tim