preferred copyright notice?

[Eric Blake]

There are currently differences between maintain.texi and gpl-3.0.texi
about what the copyright header for each file distributed in an FSF-owned
GPLv3+ package should look like.

$ diff -u gpl maintain
--- gpl 2007-07-18 06:56:27.437500000 -0600
+++ maintain    2007-07-18 06:56:11.656250000 -0600
@@ -1,15 +1,14 @@
address@hidden line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it 
does.}
-Copyright (C) @var{year} @var{name of author}
+This file is part of GNU @var{program}.

-This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
+GNU @var{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.
+the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
+any later version.

-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.
+GNU @var{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 @url{http://www.gnu.org/licenses/}.
+along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.


Which one do I follow?  The maintain.texi suggestion of adding an the
paragraph "This file is part of GNU <program>", then s/This package/GNU
<program>/ seems nice, but is different than what the GPL suggests
(although since the GPL suggestion appears after the end of terms and
conditions, my understanding is that it is not a violation of the GPL to
distribute files with different wording in the header).  Maybe
maintain.texi needs some explanation added making it explicit that FSF
packages should follow the suggestions in maintain.texi instead of those
directly in the GPL?

Is it "free software:" or "free software;"?  My preference would be a
colon - the rest of the paragraph is providing a definition of the term,
whereas a semicolon only implies a related clause but not a definition.  I
think maintain.texi needs the fix here.

Do we need the phrase "of the License" as suggested by gpl-3.0.texi?  I'm
leaning towards the GPL wording here, so maintain.texi might need a fix.

The second paragraph differs in line break locations; except for the
earlier question of 'GNU <program>' vs. 'This package', I prefer the
maintain.texi breaks, since it does not break up the name "GNU General
Public License".  Making this formatting change to gpl-3.0.texi would be
nice, for the benefit of programmers that copy the text out of the manual.

Finally, gpl-3.0.texi has a texinfo markup of the URL, which makes it
render differently in a manual than what maintain.texi shows.  Again,
since programmers might just copy and paste from the manual, I think
gpl-3.0.texi could usefully be altered to render this the way
maintain.texi does (note that @url does not provide surrounding < and > in
html format, but in the plain text source code, the addition of < and >
make it obvious that it is a URL).

-- 
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden