# Copyright and license of Julia packages

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/copyright-and-license-of-julia-packages/129598
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** question
**Created:** [June 3, 2025, 2:10pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/copyright-and-license-of-julia-packages/129598 "2025-06-03T14:10:09Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 19

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![stevengj](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stevengj/32/71_2.png) [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2025, 5:23pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/copyright-and-license-of-julia-packages/129598/19 "2025-06-03T17:23:36Z")

</div>

> [@goerz](#):
>
> Unless there are very distinct parts of a software that are written exclusively by separate groups of people, tracking copyright for individual files and people seems murky to me, legally and practically.

I don’t think the usual practice is to track individual contributors for every source file (unless that file was copied over from some other project), just to give a brief comment that the file belongs to such-and-such project copyrighted by so-and-so and others, and that it is under license X with a pointer to the license file.

It’s true that a lot of large organizations (GNU, Mozilla, etc.) do this as a matter of course, AFAICT not because it’s necessarily legally essential but more as a precaution in case a file gets copied to some other project, and it’s easier to just make a blanket coding standard than decide whether to include a copyright header on a file-by-file basis.

FWIW, here is a blog post by a lawyer (from the Creative Commons project and other prominent orgs) on the topic: [On the Importance of Per-File License Information – Luis Villa: Open Tech and Policy](https://lu.is/2012/03/on-the-importance-of-per-file-license-information/)

For my own part, I sometimes do it, but for smaller projects I’m often lazy about it and just use a single LICENSE file.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/copyright-and-license-of-julia-packages/129598)._