For example, Gists on GitHub don't have a field to track the license that they are available under. You can simply choose to create a public Gist or a secret (private) Gist.Many of the open source licenses have text that seems to indicate that you must include the full license in a distribution:The MIT License:The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.The BSD 3-Clause License:Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.The Apache 2.0 License:You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this LicenseThe GPL, on the other hand, appears to not require you to carry the full license text, but simply tell recipients how to access the license text:An interactive user interface displays Appropriate Legal Notices to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.For licenses like the MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0, is there an appropriate method of indicating the license without including or distributing the full license alongside the work?If so, what would this look like? Would it be similar to the recommendations for the GPL? If not, what would need to happen to allow for a short form of the license?
Is it possible to include a shorter form of a license if the license would be longer than the content licensed?
mit;software;bsd;apache 2.0;license notice
You can certainly try. Instead of including the entire license, you could have this:Copyright (c) 2016 Thomas Owens. All rights reserved.This work is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.  For a copy, see <https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>.In theory (IANAL), this should stand up in court, since you're still making it pretty obvious how the work is licensed. If someone can't access the license because of an Internet connection issue, there's still a fallback to All Rights Reserved, which isn't pretty but it protects your work.Bear in mind, however, that future redistributors are still legally obliged to include the full license. It's only you who doesn't have to. And yes, you could add a condition to remove this restriction, but it's a bad idea for the same reasons that crayon licenses are (it's essentially creating a crayon license, actually) - the major one of those being it's not legally vetted.To be honest, if you're using something like the MIT or BSD licenses, they're not exactly long - I'd just include the whole text in your source file. This strategy is only really worth considering if you've got a long license document like the GPL - but something like that is more often used for longer, more complex works, in which including the file wouldn't be so much of an overhead anyway.