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by riffraff 4065 days ago
I remember this was a common thing in free/open source projects some time ago[0].

At some point people started to believe that this was not necessary. I am not sure of the legal implications, of either choice, just wanted to point out that the joyent people probably were not crazy :)

[0] e.g. a random file from ISC bind https://source.isc.org/git/?p=bind9.git;a=blob;f=bin/rndc/rn...
1 comments
vidarh 4065 days ago
In every Berne Convention signatory country (which is pretty much any country that will matter to most people), published works are required by the convention to be copyrighted by default, whether or not there is a copyright notice, and the lack of a license means you have to assume you have none unless something else tells you differently. That basically makes embedding the license text pointless.

It certainly was common, though, which is/was probably because the US did not join until 1989, and prior to that US copyright law required a mandatory copyright notice, so a lot of people will have at least worked on projects old enough for this policy to have mattered.

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greggman 4065 days ago
Really? I've been putting the license in every file in my project because it's JavaScript and people drive by a website, see "foo.js" and have no idea where it came from or what license it's under. With the license in the file it's immediately clear.
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towelguy 4065 days ago
If the file doesn't have a copyright notice, I'd assume the author is the website's owner and its license should apply.

Maybe there should be a convention to add a copyright.txt file to websites like there is robots.txt and humans.txt?

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davedx 4065 days ago
Usually you'd concatenate and minify deployed JavaScript anyway. Sometimes you get a license in that, sometimes you don't. I don't think that many people really copy that much JavaScript from live sites these days...
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lojack 4065 days ago
> That basically makes embedding the license text pointless.

Embedding the license makes sense because otherwise others have to assume they don't have the right to use. The copyright notice on the other hand is pointless.

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