Should I put the complete text of BSD or MIT license to every file?
For longer licenses like GPL or MPL, there is a license notice. It is relatively short text that says what license is selected for the file. Just license notice instead of long text of the license is placed to each file. For MPL it is just 3 lines:
This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
file, You can obtain one at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.
For GPL it is longer but some authors just use only the first paragraph:
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 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
But I couldn't find license notice for BSD and MIT licenses. What can I use instead? Can I just add:
This program is published under 2-clause BSD License. Refer the COPYING file for the full text of the license.
Is there better / commonly accepted wording of generic license notice?
What about license text itself? Suppose I put the license text to separate file named COPYING. The BSD license says: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice. But If I put copyright notice to the license file, it will cover license text itself, not my program. But I don't own license text. Also sometimes it is impossible to specify all authors of the program because there are many of them and each file is copyrighted by different authors.
Can I use the following text as copyright notice?
The program that is the subject to this license is copyrighted by its authors.
But I guess it is not valid copyright notice.
I can remove the copyright notice and the requirement to retain "the above copyright notice", but it won't be BSD license after that.
Are there other options? I really don't want to copy BSD license text to every file since it is quite long and it is against DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle.