Joyent used to have the license on the top of virtually EVERY file in the repo for node. Someone removed all but one (6430 deletions) https://github.com/iojs/io.js/pull/311/files
I can imagine this makes up for a portion of it.
I can imagine this makes up for a portion of it.
At some point people started to believe that this was not necessary. I am not sure of the legal implications, of either choice, just wanted to point out that the joyent people probably were not crazy :)
[0] e.g. a random file from ISC bind https://source.isc.org/git/?p=bind9.git;a=blob;f=bin/rndc/rn...
It certainly was common, though, which is/was probably because the US did not join until 1989, and prior to that US copyright law required a mandatory copyright notice, so a lot of people will have at least worked on projects old enough for this policy to have mattered.
Maybe there should be a convention to add a copyright.txt file to websites like there is robots.txt and humans.txt?
Embedding the license makes sense because otherwise others have to assume they don't have the right to use. The copyright notice on the other hand is pointless.
Or is this just a cosmetic thing and they removed it from the files but kept it in a separate license file?
Maybe the person who removed the copyright was a node contributor?
Heh, maybe its the same person who put the copyright at the top of every file in the first place.
(I have no idea, just a guess)
"The copyright and license notice is already in the LICENSE file. There is no justifiable reason to also require that it be included in every file, since the individual files are not individually distributed except as part of the entire package."