Re: Copyright/licensing info ?

[Charles Duffy <cduffy@spamcop.net>]

Sean Dague wrote:
> In the US everything caries implicit copyright.  To ensure that something
> remains open source software, it needs to carry a license statement in that
> file.  An external file referencing headers saying "Those files are under
> this license" isn't necessarily adequate.

I'm not a lawyer, and to the extent that I've had formal legal training 
it focused on UCITA rather than intellectual property law, but I'm quite 
certain that the below is correct:

The default case for a copyrighted work is that no license exists at 
all, and thus all the actions regulated by copyright are prohibited 
unless permission to take such actions is otherwise explicitly granted. 
Granting a license to make use of a work otherwise does *not* require 
that the license itself be referred to within the work -- the license 
grant could be in an *entirely separate contract* negotiated between the 
copyright holder and the licensee with no connection (in terms of being 
packaged together) whatsoever.

Now, the copyright statement -- yes, you want that to be part of the 
same document. As for the license, however, I'm quite certain that it 
does not need to be the same document.