As I keep on peeking at articles about software copyright online, there are a few pages I’ve come across recently that I think might be of (some) general interest.
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The EUPL is currently a somewhat niche license (in terms of overall popularity, arguably it’s created by the largest institution to write a software license to date). Coming across How to use the EUPL | Joinup, I was interested to see this bit (under "Why did the European Commission create the EUPL):
It is the default licence applied to all EC produced software (Decision C(2021) 8759) and is a licence that all national open software repositories connected to the Interoperable Europe Portal - in force as from April 11 2024 - must propose (Interoperable Europe Act, article 8.4)
Given this, I suspect we’ll be seeing a fair bit more of it in the coming years.
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The REUSE licensing model makes an argument for per-file license information, even when not required
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A blog post linked from a REUSE FAQ that goes into depth on what’s a good way to add file-level copyright statements, and why. Some key points:
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Even if attribution isn’t explicitly required by a license, it’s required by copyright law in many jurisdictions [no reference provided, but I’d like to see one]
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As already mentioned in this thread, the attribution requirement of licenses should not be overlooked
list the copyright holders and/or authors – especially in jurisdictions which recognise moral rights (e.g. most of EU) it is important to keep the names of authors, if they are listed
I imagine along these lines there’s widespread casual MIT copyright violation across the Julia ecosystem where code has been copied without attribution
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Adding “all rights reserved” anywhere is a bad habit in some projects.
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Regularly bumping the copyright years in all files of a project isn’t a great idea.
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