Putting license in each code file? [closed]

Answer 1

What I do is to put a two-line comment at the top of the file, stating my company's name, last revision date and the name of the license the source file has, then at the very bottom of the file a short version of the license.

Of course, the full license (all of them in case of multiple licenses) is always enclosed on source file and release directories.

Answer 2

IANAL,

Assuming you are talking about licensing, not a EULA, you can put the license outside. This is almost always done with really long licenses such as the GPL. It would be silly to put the entire GPL license in every file. Usually you would just have some type of notice saying where you can find the actual license. This is perfectly legal. However, with really short licenses such as BSD/Apache/MIT/whatever, it is simpler to just include to license in every file, since the notice saying where to find the license would be almost as long as the license itself.

Answer 3

If your code is going to be compiled so you are just distributing a binary then it really does not matter. Because when you create a binary, the comments are removed before the compilation process takes place. It only matters if you will be distributing the actual source code either open source or closed source. This typical matters if you will be distributing a application in a scripting language that doesn't compile.

Answer 4

You dont need it for the license, a single external file will do as long as its clear what files it covers.

However for Copyright you should have the copyright notice on every piece of text.

Answer 5

A single one outside the code, please! I don't know about the others, but I hate seeing the same thing on top of every file.

I think I've read it a few times, just by page_down-ing through it.

Answer 6

No, you don't have to put the license in each source code file.

If you look closer, most FOSS applications don't do that either. They put a copyright statement at the top of each file and a short sentence telling you what license the file is under and where you can find the full text of the license. They usually point you to the COPYING or LICENSE file containing the full text of the license and/or to a website that contains the full text (in case the COPYING file isn't there anymore).

Like Michael Borgwardt said in his answers, legally you don't have to do this. But it is advisable for source code that you intend to distribute since people can immediately see who has the copyright and what the license is.