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Re: gnulib/poll.c license


From: Thomas Martitz
Subject: Re: gnulib/poll.c license
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:15:35 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20121011 Thunderbird/16.0.1

Am 25.10.2012 16:02, schrieb Eric Blake:
On 10/25/2012 07:52 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Are you using 'gnulib-tool --lgpl=2 --import poll' to get at the module?

Hello,

I didn't use that tool. Following my intuition I just browsed the source
code as normal, which gave me poll.c under GPLv2+[1].
Indeed - in gnulib, we prefer to list files under the most restrictive
license, to make them easier to copy them verbatim into restrictive
license tools; and recommend going through gnulib-tool if you need a
looser license, which will validate that rewriting licenses as part of
copying files into your project is acceptable.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/gnulib.html#Copyright

If I understand this correctly gnulib-tool replaces the license header
to reflect the real license. Perhaps the header of the unprocessed
source should be updated.
This has been asked before on this list, and the answer has always been
that it is more work than worth the effort, and that gnulib-tool is the
preferred way to use gnulib source code.


I cannot really understand your reasoning as it makes it hard to discover that less restrictive license terms are also possible. I wouldn't have found that LGPLv2+ is no problem if I didn't go through the "hassle" of writing mails and subscribing to this mailing list. Perhaps it could be made more prominent on the gnulib website, at least.

Additionally it means extra work when merging upstream fixes harder, which is unfortunate.

But if you have determined that this approach works better for you I'm not going to question it any further.

Best regards.



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