rms@AI.MIT.EDU (12/22/89)
I see that more and more people are making the mistake of posting
significant pieces of code with a notice saying that the general
public license applies, but lacking an actual copyright notice.
Unfortunately, stating copying conditions doesn't carry any weight
without the copyright notice. If the code is in the public domain, it
can be put into proprietary programs by anyone, regardless of whatever
else it says in the program.
The way to avoid this is to add a copyright notice as follows:
Copyright (c) 1989 <your name>
to the beginning of the file, just as is found in all
the Emacs source files.
If you intend to give the program to the FSF, then you can use "Free
Software Foundation, Inc." as the name in the copyright notice.
If you have recently posted code and omitted the copyright notice, you
can remedy the omission by posting a brief message telling everyone
that the notice was omitted by mistake, and that they should add a
notice to their copies. Show explicitly what they should add.