[License-discuss] Acceptable LICENSE citation

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi, NN--

On Jun 7, 2013, at 8:40 AM, Nirk Niggler <nirk.niggler at gmail.com> wrote:
> [ ... ]
> Lots of people are releasing code under the MIT license, which is great (at least they remember to apply a license :)
> 
> However, I've seen people try to apply it in different ways:
> 
> 1) just saying "License: MIT" in a README
> 
> 2) just saying "License: MIT" in the source code
> 
> 3) attaching a LICENSE file to the repository
> 
> 4) putting the license text in the README
> 
> 5) putting the license text in the source code
> 
> The MIT license itself explicitly states that the license text must be included in copies of the software, so option (5) is acceptable.  Are any of the other options acceptable?  This wouldn't normally strike me as odd, but some licenses like GPL explicitly permit users to reference the license.

It's very common for developers to have a short comment block at the top of each file listing author, copyright + license, and maybe a version/revision/$Id: $ tag; many IDEs and revision control systems will create and even populate such fields in a template automatically.  That's your option (2).

People using software under licenses which are many pages long almost always invoke the license by reference.  For software licensed under terms like the BSD/MIT/zlib/X11/etc which fit on a single page, including the license terms directly aka option (5) is fairly common.

Your option numbering scheme has a fortuitous coincidence: option (4) was typically found in association with software under the old 4-clause BSD license containing the "required attribution" clause.

It made for long and highly repetitive READMEs.

People who do not do either (4) or (5) tend to do both (2) + (3).
People who write good READMEs probably include the information as per (1).

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck