Releasing open source software

**jacek** · 27th September 2007, 13:57

Originally Posted by dvmorris

Does anyone have any tips for automating the actual process of sticking license information into the source code?

You can try something like this:

bash Code:

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LICENCE=/.../licence
for f in `find ...`; do
   cat $LICENCE $f > $f.x
   mv $f.x $f
done

LICENCE=/.../licence
for f in `find ...`; do
   cat $LICENCE $f > $f.x
   mv $f.x $f
done

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(make sure you make a backup of your sources before trying it).

Originally Posted by dvmorris

Also, is there a general tutorial for which files to put where and exactly what to say where in each directory of a project, or is that important? I would really like to do this whole licensing thing right, but I'm not sure where to start...

You have to add a comment in every source file you wrote with information about copyright and licence (see the link in previous post for exact text) and you have to add a file with full licence text to your sources (it's usually named COPYING or LICENCE).