How to minimize the amount of place used by GPL copyright notice?

Posted by Lukasz Lew on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Lukasz Lew
Published on 2009-10-27T16:31:41Z Indexed on 2010/04/07 22:13 UTC
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gpl

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licensing

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copyright

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header

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verbosity

Gnu GPL page advocates a following header in each file of GPL project:

This file is part of Foobar.

Foobar 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 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Foobar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Foobar. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

I find this an over kill. Can't it be shorter and somehow refer to COPYING or LICENCE file?

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