Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> It's important to us to make sure that third parties *know* they are free
> to use NetBSD as they want to.  The easiest way to do that is to stamp a
> consistent copyright and license header onto every file so that they do
> not have to worry about files that bear no copyright (or, worse, a copyright
> but no license, or a confusing license) but that might, or might not, be
> "trivial".
> 

Understood. Now, if the file only contains a pointer to an external file 
that documents the license details (suc as "This file is under the BSD 
license described in $topsrc/LICENSE and/or http://....license.txt), 
would that be enough?

This not only shortens the "license header", it also guarantees 
consistency. Of course, not all files use the same license, so there may 
be a need for more than one LICENSE file.