Ancestors

Written by tippfehlr on 2024-10-03 at 00:10

Why does the MIT license need a copyright statement when all other licenses do not?

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Written by CSDUMMI on 2024-10-10 at 23:05

@tippfehlr they all do - in the file header (which is too often forgotten, but essential for legal certainity). Because the MIT license is so short, it is often enough used as the license header.

GPLs have a provision in the license that all files and the output of a program should contain this header (GPLv3):

Copyright (C) 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 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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Written by CSDUMMI on 2024-10-10 at 23:05

@tippfehlr

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt, see last section: "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs"

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Toot

Written by tippfehlr on 2024-10-10 at 23:34

@csdummi that is funny. I have SPDX style license identifiers but I guess I will need to change it to this. I guess it is helpful to actually read the thing

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Descendants

Written by CSDUMMI on 2024-10-10 at 23:42

@tippfehlr the REUSE tool by @fsfe is the probably the best tool to ensure your code has the correct license headers.

https://reuse.software/

It also supports multiple licenses within a project.

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Written by CSDUMMI on 2024-10-11 at 00:09

@tippfehlr pyou can see why MIT does not need this header - the GPL header is as long as the entire MIT license.

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