Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

3
  • 2
    "the terms of the XYZ license, which unfortunately won't be written for another century." It's been 130 years and counting. :P Commented Feb 1, 2013 at 15:47
  • A lot of companies like to have a copyright line because they want to do "license management". In other words: check for something GPL'ish that was copied from the internet. Basically they scan the source code for a copyright line - which is really just the first line that contains "Copyright" / "(c)". The example says that it is not free software because it is "All Rights Reserved" - which implies that there must be some license sheet in a third place, may be a LICENSE.TXT file or real paper. Because of that implication you do not need a boilerplate license text. Commented May 18, 2017 at 18:14
  • 4
    Having the copyright header in the file doesn't mean that it won't be lost when bits and pieces are remixed in other projects. People can copy parts of files, or even just remove the copyright header. Commented Nov 22, 2023 at 12:16