Take for example the GPL-3.0 license.
Near the end it states:
END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs
...
So I though that the "correct" way is to use the instructions there and use the small excerpt they provided:
<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
Copyright (C)<year>
<name of author>
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
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.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Replace <year>
etc and paste those in a LICENSE file. (but not on top of each file or 80% of my code would be licensing stuff...)
When looking at famous projects however, they seem to have just put the entire license in there with the "HOW TO APPLY..." still added and without even replacing <year>
, <name of author>
etc.
So I'm starting to wonder: if I remove everything after END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
or if I actually follow the instructions, is it still the same license...