License Headers

The DispatchAtlas license-header registry — the single-line SPDX header every commentable source file carries, plus blanket coverage for generated and data files.

Every commentable source file in DispatchAtlas carries one single-line SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT header; everything else is covered by the annotation blocks in REUSE.toml and the project LICENSE. This page is the ratified policy; the machine projection the gate consumes is tools/license_header.toml, and tools/license_header.py enforces it (check fails closed in pre-commit and CI, inject adds a missing header at the correct position idempotently).

Inline header forms

File class	Header line	Position
`.py` `.toml` `.yml` `.yaml` `.sh` `.ps1` `.cff` `.editorconfig` `.gitattributes` `.gitignore` `CODEOWNERS`	`# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT`	First line; after the shebang when one is present
`.ts` `.tsx` `.mjs`	`// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT`	First line
`.js`	`// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT` (the block form `/* SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT */` is also accepted)	First line
`.css`	`/* SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT */`	First line
`.md`	`<!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT -->`	First line, or first non-blank line after the closing YAML frontmatter fence
`.mdx`	`{/* SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT */}`	First non-blank line after the closing frontmatter fence (HTML comments are invalid in MDX bodies)
`.xml`	`<!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT -->`	First line, or directly after the `<?xml …?>` declaration

Blanket-covered classes

Non-commentable, data, asset, lockfile, and marker classes carry no inline header; REUSE.toml asserts their license and copyright centrally: .json .svg .csv .gz .whl .ttf .woff2 .pdf .png .ico .log .hash .map .tsbuildinfo .txt .html .lock .typed and the pagefind index classes, plus the basenames LICENSE, CNAME, .nojekyll, py.typed, and .gitkeep.

Generated-output trees

Every file under a generated-output tree is machine-emitted evidence or build output and is blanket-covered regardless of extension: site/out/ and each package's dist/, plus the local layers of the experiments workspace. The gate never requires or injects inline headers there.

Exemptions and scope

License texts under LICENSES/ are the licenses themselves and carry no header. Dependency and cache trees (.venv/, node_modules/, byte-code and tool caches) are outside the policy: they are not DispatchAtlas files. A file class absent from this registry is reported by the gate as unregistered and fails the check — new classes are ratified here before they ship.

Running the gate

uv run python tools/license_header.py check
uv run python tools/license_header.py inject

check walks every tree — tracked, private, and generated — and exits non-zero on any missing or unregistered finding. inject writes the canonical header for the file's class at the correct position and changes nothing on a second run.