Copyright/license notices are absent

[jirassimok]

The repo includes the GPL, but doesn't actually say who owns the copyright or that it is provided under said license. The intent seems clear at a casual glance, but the license notice is usually where it is clarified whether the license grant is for GPL-3-only or 3-or-later, so that information is currently missing from the project (as previously noted in #412¹).

The "proper" solution (as recommended by GNU) would be to include a full copyright and license notice in every source file. But as the GPL header is rather bulky, some projects, like dwl, instead put the main copyright and license notices directly in the license file, which is quite a bit easier.

Basically, COPYING probably should include a header similar to this²:

SwayNotificationCenter - A GTK-based notification daemon for Wayland

Copyright 2021-2025 Erik Reider and SwayNotificationCenter contributors

SwayNotificationCenter is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3,
as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
Public License for more details.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then, ideally, the other files should also refer to that file³, but I think that's a bit less important.

Also, in the PKGBUILD and rpkg files, the license identifier should be the proper SPDX identifier GPL-3.0-only, instead of the vaguer GPL3.

---

(I noticed this in the process of adding appropriate licenses to my configuration files, but I don't actually need the license clarified myself.)

Footnotes

1. To my untrained eye, the answer given there (that the project is GPL-3-only) was correct, but for a different reason: the GPL itself implies that an implicit notice is required for the "or later" part, and there's no notice at all here. ↩

2. Modeled after the header in dwl's license file, which uses the standard text recommended by GNU, though I modified it for 3-only. ↩

3. dwl uses See LICENSE file for copyright and license details. in most source files. ↩