about the provenance of goods (but at zero cost). On a related note, if I "give" something to you "free from restrictions", you might think (innocently, or more likely, not) that included the right to copyright it yourself. Which might be fine until other people I gave it to thought the same thing. I think a minimal copyright notice helps to forestall this possibility, and the resultant lawsuits and acrimony. "...What if somebody strips out the header, and one of his recipients is damaged by the software, and then that recipient sues you? Sure you added a liability disclaimer, but you didn't put any legal teeth demanding it stayed with the software, and then it was removed..." This is something I have thought about too -- the whole enforceability/liabilty aspect of GLD'd/OSS code. The term "non-repudiation" keeps hoving into view. If I go around blagging open source code (stripped of headers, per your example), then can I really claim to have any guarantee of quality or suitability for purpose in a court of law? Similarly, if I strip out all headers/identifying comments from some GPL code, and compile it into my own...how can it be proven that I didn't receive the code on an anonymous coders forum, or via email etc? There doesn't seem to be any legally concrete way to prove that I "should have known" it was GPL'd. Personally, I think the whole open source licensing scene is held together by some form of 'honor system' more than