Headerless.org
The Headerless.org Initiative is committed to promote a streamlined license and copyright process in FOSS projects.
Why Headerless
The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement has created a prosperous and almost utopistic ecosystem of sharing and collaborating. While the burden of tooling and services around creating or contributing to FOSS projects has decreased dramatically, topics such as licensing remain complex. Especially beginners wanting to join the FOSS community can be easily distracted by all the guidelines and practices around the handling of copyrights and licenses. While permissive licenses such as the MIT and Apache-2.0 are easy to understand and comply with, capturing the license situation of a project with mixed licenses on file level is overwhelming and discouraging.
Headerless.org therefore promotes to use no license and copyright headers in software projects and instead use a centralized approach to proudly state your FOSS license of choice. In case of a mixed license project, follow the 12Factor principles and split your project up into isolated dependencies, each with its individual license.
6 Reasons to go Headerless
- Reduce License Complexity: People looking at your source code or planning to use your project for further work will have a hard time to go through all your source files and looking at the license and copyright headers, just to get an overview of the license situation.
- Reduce Maintenance: Having to maintain license and copyright headers in all your source files is a maintenance intensive tasks. Having to update the copyright year and adding new copyrights for new maintainers not only takes time, but also creates a lot of noise in your commit history.
- Prevent Redundancy: Most FOSS projects rely on a single license for the whole project. Mentioning the license in every file again is as redundant as adding the copyright year in every file. The commit history already clearly states the author and date by which your intellectual property has been created.
- Simplify License Compliance: Almost all development ecosystems come with easy ways to state your project’s license and have ways to get a list of all licenses used by your project’s dependencies. Doing the same for license headers with various formats is difficult and prone to false positives.
- Facilitate Contributions: When contributing to a FOSS project, there can be uncertainties regarding license and copyright practices. Does a contributer have to add a copyright when he just wants to fix a typo? Should copyrights be removed when rewriting substantial parts of the code? Removing such uncertainties and making the process easy to understand will greatly benefit the willingness to contribute.
- Empower Sharing Culture: While license and copyright headers can easily be removed by copycats, permissive licenses explicitly state that copying parts of your source code is allowed, which boosts the sharing and reuse culture.
Join the Movement
Making your project Headerless.org compliant is easy and painless:
- Omit any copyright and license headers from all source files in your project, including any SPDX license identifiers.
- Follow the ecosystem dependent (e.g.
package.jsonfor NPM) and independent (e.g.LICENSEfile) best practises to display your license choice.
If you want to promote that your project is compliant with Headerless.org or simply want to support the movement, add the Headerless.org badge to your projects:
[](http://headerless.org)