On Apr 20, 10:14 ¨Βν¬ Γθαδ Πεςςιξ Όγ®®®ΐαποτθεοξ®ξετχςοτεΊ

> For the record, I think actually putting license text in the COPYING file
> is a bad idea, *especially* when using absurdly complex licenses like the
> GPL.  ¨Βθε ζιμεξανε σεενιξδιγατιφε οζ ηυιδαξγε ζοτθςεαδεςςατθες
> than legal boilerplate -- a "user friendly" filename that leads the user
> into an ambush by a wall of legal text.  ¨Βμεασχθεξ ωοσεζιμεξανε
> like LICENSE you know what to expect if it contains license text.  ¨Βθι> is why I prefer to use COPYING to convey information in layman's terms
> about stuff like copyrights and summarizing the general license picture
> of the software.

Interesting. So you advocate splitting copyright information and the
actual license text and naming the license file so it is recognizable
by name. I notice some doing the later with a `MIT-LICENSE` file. And
really I've always wondered if it is really necessary to distribute
the entire license text. Would it not be good enough to just reference
an official online copy, and only include the minimum copyright notice
required? In which case, wouldn't a clause in the README file be
enough and we can just dispose of any COPYING or LICENSE files?

Also, as to the former, for awhile I seriously considered having a
file named `(c)2011` (or whatever year it is).

> I'm kinda disappointed to see stuff like License.txt, which is both:
>
> * not really stand-out and standardized the way LICENSE has become
>
> * generically named so that you don't, for instance, know anything about
> the license text it contains without opening it

For a long time I didn't like the whole License.txt style either. For
starters I find file extensions a bit archaic. I'm not sure why our
file systems don't support file type attributes. But clearly that's
not something that will be changing anytime soon, so I've come to
accept the extensions b/c they are useful to document renderers such
as GitHub. As for the letter case, I felt the same way about not
standing out and not a common practice. More recently however I
started to think the standing out was rather relative. When every file
is all caps none of them standout either. So now I am thinking the
titlecase filenames are a bit easier on the eyes.