Re: [Bug-gnulib] missing licenses in gnulib

[Robert Millan]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 10:00:25PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Robert Millan wrote:
> >   lib/atanl.c
> >   lib/logl.c
> 
> If you look into the glibc CVS log of sysdeps/ieee754/ldbl-128/s_atanl.c
> and sysdeps/ieee754/ldbl-128/e_logl.c, you see that the copyright holder
> (Stephen Moshier) has given permission to license them under LGPL.
> 
> >   lib/diacrit.c
> 
> This comes from Fran?ois Pinard's libit-0.2, which is GPL.
> 
> >   lib/alloca.c
> 
> A long-time GNU citizen, distributed as part of many GNU packages.
> 
> >   lib/lbrkprop.h

For these borrowed files from other GNU or free software projects, I think we
still need an explicit note in the files distributed as part of gnulib.

Could you please add the license header that corresponds to the license terms
of the package from which it was borrowed to these files?  IANAL, but I think
you can legaly do that.

> This is an automatically generated file. It's ridiculous to put a copyright
> license on an automatically generated file if the generating program is
> available under GPL, since anyone could take that generating program,
> modify its printf() statements to emit a different license, and run the
> generating program.

I don't know how does copyright law apply to auto-generated programs.  Maybe
debian-legal can offer advice on this.

> >   tests/test-stpncpy.c
> 
> I've put this under GPL now.

Ack.  Thanks!

> > The worst problem, however, is in the "m4" and "modules" directories, where
> > most of the files are unlicensed.
> 
> For the m4 files, I propose to add the standard notice to them:
> 
> [...]

Well let's see how the GPL vs LGPL discussion ends up.  I don't really have
a take on this.

> About the modules/ files. I wrote most of them. What kind of copyright
> would you find useful, given that it's only meta-information?

I think when they're copyright-significant GPL would be fine.  However, my
suggestion is that you set the global COPYING file to say "GPL unless stated
otherwise".  This way we can avoid trouble with copyright-significant misc
files like READMEs and such.

> Oh right, standards.texi is under GFDL. So this means that Debian will not
> ship the GNU standards in the next release?

There's no official statement on this, but the situation is that they may be
included with sarge (at the maintainer's discretion) but not for later
releases, when the new DFSG that unambigously applies to documentation takes
place (see http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_004).

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