License header
From FreeMind
Revision as of 06:41, 15 May 2026 by Dan Polansky (talk | contribs)
FreeMind uses the following license header in .java files (see also Licensing; keywords: copyright header, copyright notice):
/* FreeMind - A program for creating and viewing mind maps * Copyright (C) 2000-<YEAR> <AUTHORS> * See COPYING for Details * * 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 2 * 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, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. */
Questions:
- What detail and granularity of authorship should be maintained in the license header?
- Would it suffice to identify the license more succinctly, e.g. "License: GNU GPL V2+; see COPYING for details"? For instance, the applicable SPDX license identifier is "GPL-2.0-or-later"[1].
- What FOSS projects use this kind of succincts identification?
- What FOSS projects use SPDX identifier and in what way?
Example author-declaring lines in the license headers of FreeMind 0.9.0:
- Copyright (C) 2000-2001 Joerg Mueller <joergmueller@bigfoot.com>
- Copyright (C) 2000-2006 Joerg Mueller, Daniel Polansky, Christian Foltin, Dimitri Polivaev and others.
- Copyright (C) 2000-2006 Christian Foltin and others
- Copyright (C) 2000-2004 Joerg Mueller, Daniel Polansky, Christian Foltin and others.
Helpful queries using Unix-like oneliners:
- grep -r --include="*.java" "Copyright" .
- grep -h -r --include="*.java" "Copyright" . | sort | uniq
- grep -h -r --include="*.java" "Copyright" . | sed "s/.*\(C\).*[0-9] *//" | sort | uniq
- This one drops the beginning with years and year ranges.
Examples from other projects
Example author-declaring line in Emacs[2]:
- Copyright (C) 2023-2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Notes: the license header resembles that of FreeMind. GNU Emacs requires copyright assignment to FSF, making the above possible.
Example license header from Linux[3]:
// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-only /* * kernel/sched/core.c * * Core kernel CPU scheduler code * * Copyright (C) 1991-2002 Linus Torvalds * Copyright (C) 1998-2024 Ingo Molnar, Red Hat */
Example license header from LibreOffice[4]:
/* * This file is part of the LibreOffice project. * * This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public * License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this * file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. * * This file incorporates work covered by the following license notice: * * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed * with this work for additional information regarding copyright * ownership. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache * License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file * except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of * the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 . */
Notes: The authors are not stated on a per-file basis; they can be seen from the commit history. See also https://api.libreoffice.org/share/readme/LICENSE.html.
