License header for code licensed as GPL 3 only

Question

The text of the GNU GPL 3 license ends with a section titled "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs", which states that you should include a license notice within each source file, and provides a template for that notice. The template includes the following sentence:

This program 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.

I would think that it would be inappropriate to use the template provided if the code is licensed under the GPL version 3 only, but I can't find any information about what should be used instead.

Answer 1

If you want to allow GPL v3 only, you of course have to state that.

While the example recommendation on the GNU pages give the example for the "or later", the SPDX page has the recommendations for basically every license combination. For GPLv3 only it reads

Copyright (C) YEAR NAME-OF-AUTHOR

This program 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, version 3.

This program 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 this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

You might find in file headers this text with the last two paragraphs quoted here left out.