I said:
David> From a programmer's perspective I think the "cryptic" approach is FAR superior. There are lots of tools that can quickly examine files and return text with the pattern "SPDX-License-Identifier: ", and other tools that can trivially process the stuff after it. The above alternative is more work to process, and humans don't like unnecessary work :-).

D M German:

When you say "programmer" who do you mean? The author of the software, the one who is thinking about using the file, or a large organization who wants to scan massive amounts of code?

I was focusing on the first two, and I agree with Wolfgang Denk:
"For a software developer, there is no sharp line here. While creating new software, we frequently borrow from existing code, so we are creators and consumers at the same time.

However, the "large organization" case is also plausible. Large organizations in practice will depend on technical people to get the information; it helps to make a common task easy for the technical people.

--- David A. Wheeler