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[Xen-devel] Re: Copyright/licensing info ?



Sean Dague wrote:
In the US everything caries implicit copyright.  To ensure that something
remains open source software, it needs to carry a license statement in that
file.  An external file referencing headers saying "Those files are under
this license" isn't necessarily adequate.

I'm not a lawyer, and to the extent that I've had formal legal training it focused on UCITA rather than intellectual property law, but I'm quite certain that the below is correct:

The default case for a copyrighted work is that no license exists at all, and thus all the actions regulated by copyright are prohibited unless permission to take such actions is otherwise explicitly granted. Granting a license to make use of a work otherwise does *not* require that the license itself be referred to within the work -- the license grant could be in an *entirely separate contract* negotiated between the copyright holder and the licensee with no connection (in terms of being packaged together) whatsoever.

Now, the copyright statement -- yes, you want that to be part of the same document. As for the license, however, I'm quite certain that it does not need to be the same document.


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