Should I provide a LICENSE.txt or COPYING.txt file in my project? [closed]
COPYING
is standard in the GNU project. I think that either of COPYING
or LICENSE
would be understood. The FSF has a guide on how to use the GPL, which suggests COPYING
, while the Producing Open Source Software book suggests either COPYING
or LICENSE
. The Apache License recommends a boilerplate that just points to the license online, though the Apache project seems to also include a LICENSE
file in their code containing the relevant license or licenses.
It's up to you whether you want to add the .txt
suffix; on Windows and Mac OS X it tends to be helpful for default file associations, while on Linux or most other Unix-type operating systems suffixes are optional and it's generally assumed that files are plain text.