Re: musl licensing

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sdf.org>]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 05:31:48PM -0600, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:
> 
> Post-Berne no copyright statement is needed at all. Marking license
> terms, authors and dates in individual files is strictly a convenience
> factor for those using or reading the code.
> 

Yes.  However, musl has had more than one person express a desire for
per-file copyright notifications.  None of these people have expressed
interest in needlessly including a year.  With this information, we can
ask if 

/* Copyright the musl authors.  Available under a ___-style license, which
   can be found at http://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/COPYRIGHT */

would meet their needs.

Such a notice would minimize the amount of source-control noise, because
it would not need to be updated every year.  The license in question can
even be marked in a way that makes it easy for fossology et al. to
automatically classify data.  If you put the year in, no useful
information is added (that can't also be got from the source control
software) but the message will then require maintenance.

So, in this specific instance, I focused on the year alone as being
unnecessary, because the notification itself may (to some) be desireable
for other reasons.  I personally don't care if each file holds a
notification or not; I'll use musl either way.  But if we want to
satisfy the most people with the least maintenance load, it might be
worth considering.

khm