general copyright question

[Mike Parker]

Saaa wrote:
> A lot of open source projects (on dsource) use this clause in their 
> copyright notice:
> 
> ...
> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
> notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
> documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
> ...
> 
> What exactly does it mean for a binary program to reproduce a copyright?
> 
> What should be written in the documentation?
> Something like:
> readme.txt [
> .. documentation ..
> 
> ??
> 
> < insert copyright from X> ]
> 
> and what if there is no documentation? 
> 

Read that clause carefully. The copyright notice, the list of conditions 
and the disclaimer should all be included in the documentation or other 
materials. You don't need to output a string, as suggested in another 
post, nor do you need to reproduce the copyright for every file used. 
With both source and binary distributions practice to include a 
license.txt that contains the required text, i.e. one file containing 
the complete header found at the top of each source file. That meets the 
requirements fine.