[acqq]

> Each file is not "the Software".

Can you give any support for this which is not your own "I say so because that's how I understand what I have read"?

That is, can you give a link of some court case where your claim was confirmed, or a link to a project where some big company changed the copyright lines in some library source files, when these lines were previously MIT licensed?

If not, repeating your own claims in many posts here doesn't make your claims more believable.

I still understand that every source file (as in, having the lines that produce executable code) containing a copyright is a "software" where the copyright lines have to be preserved as soon as the author initially wrote the lines, and I need some independent evidence, as stated before, to be convinced otherwise.

[nanny]

I don't know of any court cases or other precedent, no. I am working with the definitions of "software" and "program" as I am familiar with them being used in various software licenses. But that doesn't really matter because the only assumptions I'm basing this argument on are contained in the MIT/Expat and what connectFree has done with Zen.

For the sake of the argument, let's grant you the premise that each file is its own "software" (as the word is used in the MIT/Expat). The only requirement of the license is this: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." So even if connectFree removed all the copyright notices in the source code files, they still meet that condition because the original Zig license is included in their modified copy of Zig. It doesn't matter what the definition of "software" is here, because they meet the conditions regardless of what that definition is.

[acqq]

Wrong. If every source file is "software" the copyright should not be removed from the source file.

There are even international laws about copyrights, and removing the original copyright is simply a violation even on the international level -- the original author has to remain an author. It is he who initially copyrighted the files. Your "working as you are familiar" doesn't mean a thing.