On Tuesday 06 May 2008, Michal Simek wrote: > > > Absolutely, but is it really necessary to have 14-16 lines of comment > > (including a copyright notice) for a file whose single real line is just > > to include another file? i.e. reduce all these to 1 line files. > > Can I do it? I think every file need license. If you want a good answer on that, ask your lawyer. In general, every file comes with a 'license' (GPLv2) and 'copyright' (you or the person you copied from) even if you don't put either statement in the file. Files smaller than some 10 lines are usually not considered to be covered by copyright, even if you have the statement in there. Most files nowadays are written by large corporations that have strict rules about what you must put in there to protect their intellectual property. It's certainly safe to leave out the file names from the comments, they don't add any value at all. Similarly, you should easily be able to leave out the license statement, unless you are under a contract that forces you to leave them present. Most people here will be happier if you remove the license statements. The most tricky one part is the copyright statement ("Copyright 2012 Big Corporation of America"), which you strictly speaking should never remove from a file unless you have permission from the copyright holder. Many of your files in your patch set are obviously copies of existing kernel files, with the original copyright notice replaced with "Atmark Techno, inc.". You can draw your own conclusions from that ;-) Obviously, I am not a lawyer, so don't consider this as legal advice. I really hope this doesn't turn into a flamewar, as discussions on intellectual property sometimes do. Arnd <>< -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html