As a guy who sends these notes, the response rate drops very quickly if the project hasn't been touched in the past year, and this is not uncommon.
So you end up with a lot of badly marked or unmarked open source, which isn't great.
The license/copying file that is actually distributed with the code still is what you have to go by.
Without license information you MUST assume full copyright sadly.
I agree.
Sadly, we also run into plenty of cases distributing LICENSE files that don't match file headers, etc.
Yeah it's just unfortunate. It's effectively like attempting to distribute a broken library. People simply can't use it, and even though it may have had the workings of a good solution for many people, you're just not going to get any users/contributors. shrug