Why does this project add the header boilerplate to every file?

[ChrisDryden]

From a readability perspective, this project benefits from being significantly less verbose and easier to understand than the lower level implementations. One area where you can see this is with decisions like this one #5197 #5184 where adding additional boilerplate in all of the files was removed because it was recognized that it did not serve a practical benefit to have that information in the source code.

When researching this topic of why developers put this header into the files it was not readily apparent to me the practical purpose of these messages. It appears from a legal perspective theres no difference between having a top level license compared to having a header in every file saying to review the license. From what I can gather its only necessary when you have a mix of licenses in different files and need to make that clear for convenience sake, but even then all thats required from a legal perspective is having that information in the LICENSE.

From a practical perspective, given the advent of LLMs and their use in explaining how coreutilities utilities work, there is a real practical downside of having these messages directly in the source code of every file. In my day job this is something that we work on actively and actively measure the decrease in performance of a model given additional tokens that aren't relevant to any tasks.

[ChrisDryden]

I think this is a great example of simplifying and reducing the boilerplate to make it easier to read and maintain: #7710 . This file also reduces the need for having the LICENSE symlink in every subfolder because when its published it will reference the one in the parent directory. This change was originally done 3 years ago and #3131 with the workspace shared info its no longer necessary.