Re: debian/watch for gitorious

[Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 10:54:58AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> None of the C files contain copyright or license information, which is
> a good idea:
> 
> http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/03/17/on-the-importance-of-per-file-license-information/

Please, don't!

There are at least three reasons why not:

* It adds significant amount of legal spam that gets into way.  Every single
  time someone looks through one of the files, it takes a second or two to
  skip past the header.  This wastes time that could be spent coding or
  debugging.

* Such notices invariably become inaccurate.  Unless every single
  contributor takes care to meticulously update this information (and hardly
  anyone does), it will be at best misleading.  On the other hand, a global
  license file carries less data and thus has a fair chance of being valid
  (as you don't need to care about individual files).  And if you use
  version control, you already have per-file -- and even, per-line,
  authorship tracking that requires no manual effort to update.

* It is legally dubious whether anyone will be able to cut this spam away
  once it gets there, kind of like an epoch.

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