Question

I’m intending to use the Ms-RL for a project on CodePlex, but I’m not sure how far I should go in terms of how I actually use / embed it in the solution.

Simply including the full licence text somewhere in each project is a given, as is appropriate usage in the project properties / assembly meta-tags; but would you go so far as to include the full licence or (more likely) a short statement pointing to the full licence) at the head of every file?

FYI – The complete solution contains an ASP.NET web project and about 6 ‘normal’ class based projects.

Answer 1

In the end I took the GNU GPL type approach:

• A copy of the full licence text with each project (licence.txt).
• A ‘reference’ to the licence file (as well as a small blurb) at the top of each code file.

Of course, throwing a bit of text in the top of each code file might be a simple concept but its not a trivial thing to do if you have multiple projects and files. So in the end I whipped up a small tool to do it for me.

Get it here: http://www.morphological.geek.nz/MorphologicalLicenceInserter/default.aspx (99Kb, full source code, released under Ms-RL).

How to use it:

• Copy your code to a staging area (I use RoboCopy).
• Crank up the Licence Inserter Tool and have it ’embed’ a bit of text (which you write once) into the top of every file you want the reference to appear in.
• Check or test the end result of the licence embedding process, and you’re good to go.

The program automatically ‘wraps’ your text in the correct commenting syntax for the file type.