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Legal Comments

"Why, oh why," you might ask, "does every single file in this source tree start with a header comment reminding me that it is released under the Zero-Clause BSD License, distributed blah blah blah?"

Great question.

Mostly, it serves to remind anyone reading the file that they can do, effectively, whatever they want with it. This is not a given in western legal systems (and in particular, in the US), and since the spirit of Gale is to freely copy files around into monorepos or forks, and generally to have complete flexibility in how files are structured (or unstructured...) on disk, it helps ensure a file that floats away from this repo still reminds the user that it is not encumbered.

As an extension of the above, it serves as a bit of a repetitive broadcast of @klardotsh's general disdain for enforcing (or trying to enforce) software licenses (believe it or not, I used to be a GPL die-hard), for restrictive and absurdly-long-lived copyright law (my life plus 70 years by US law), and for "intellectual property" as a concept. Separating the code from any pay related to the time spent writing it is a model I want to explore and see explored more in software.