Recommendations for copyright and licence notices¶
If you are open-sourcing software or gateware, we recommend that you generally follow the REUSE guidelines for affixing copyright and licensing notices to your work.
A copyright notice is a brief statement that allows to assert the ownership of a work, and the time of its creation. It should indicate the copyright holder i.e. CERN, and the year of creation of the element of your work that holds this copyright statement, such as a source file or drawing. The indication of the initial year of creation is sufficient, and there is no need to indicate a time frame or a successive number of years.
The licence notice provides an indication of the licence under which the work is licensed.
For example, in the header of a C file licensed under Apache 2.0, you should include:
Notice that using SPDX tags is part of the REUSE recommendations. This allows software to automatically check your project for compliance with the guidelines, because the notices are machine-readable.
For hardware projects, you should, to the extent possible, embed the notices (also using SPDX tags) in the design files themselves, e.g. schematics and layout for the case of a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design.
REUSE also allows you to bulk-license your work by maintaining a single text file with the list of copyright and licensing information for each source/design file. This can be particularly convenient for hardware designs, because then the REUSE compliance tool can do its work independently of the file formats for the design. For hardware designs, it is still recommended to additionally embed the notices in the designs themselves so that someone looking at e.g. schematics can easily see the copyright and licence information.