Re: [PATCH] clone: Warn if clone lacks LICENSE or COPYING file

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 5:46 PM, David A. Wheeler <dwheeler@dwheeler.com> wrote:
> Junio C Hamano:
>>    An approach that checks only the top-level directory for fixed
>>    filename pattern would not be an effective way to protect the
>>    cloners, either.
>
> I disagree, I think it's remarkably effective. *Many* projects
> do this, including git itself. After all, many humans need to find out the licensing
> basics too; having a simple convention for *finding* it helps humans and tools alike.
> It's not even limited to open source software; developers of proprietary materials
> (software or now) *also* typically want to declare licensing.
>
> Sure, the top-level licensing text might be incomplete, but having that information
> provides a big help, and it's what most people rely on anyway. Indeed, a *lack*
> of this is a sign of trouble, which is exactly what warnings are good for.

I don't think you're going to find people disagreeing with you that
it's good to have license information where appropriate, but Git is
the wrong tool to warn about this.

It's a generic content tracking tool, it shouldn't be warning on the
assumption that what you're tracking is a) an open source project and
b) that you care to be notified about some arbitrary files being
missing.

A lot of Git repositories don't care at all about licensing, and
having git-clone warn about this would just be useless noise most of
the time. E.g. anything I put on gist.github.com, the code hundreds of
people contribute to at work (we never distribute it anywhere, so a
license would be pointless). I even have open source projects myself
where there's no LICENSE or COPYING files since that would be
redundant to notices in the files themselves, but I digress.