Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of epsilon

[Jaime E. Villate]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 08:59:30AM -0500, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> A package was submitted to savannah.gnu.org.
> This mail was sent to address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> Luca Saiu <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
> License: gpl
> Other License: 
> Package: epsilon
> System name: epsilon
> This package wants to apply for inclusion in the GNU project
> 
> My project is an interpreter of a purely-functional language,
> based on a virtual machine (LVM, included in the distribution
> of my project).
...

Hi,
Please notice that you have an old version of the GPL. In COPYING you have:

 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
                          675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
And it should be:

 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
     59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

You have also replaced:
  "as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
  License, or (at your option) any later version."
by:
  "version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation."
in the copying permission statements of all your source files.
Please notice that the "(at your option)" clause is directed to your users and
not to you.

Having made that change, your are not doing anything wrong and
your software continues to be free software. However, the FSF doesn't want to
accept that license in its hosts because it would be compatible with GPL v2,
but wouldn't be compatible with the next version. And this is something that
the FSF wants to discourage.

Please keep in mind that if you decide to accept Savannah's policy of "GPL V2
or later", if a version 3 comes out nobody in Savannah would go and update
the license information of your project; it would continue to be "GPL V2 or
later" if you wanted it that way and it would not cause any conflicts for
Savannah. And if a user wants to abide by the rules of V2, because he/she finds
it better than V3, they can choose to do that.

If you decide to accept version 2 or later of the GPL, you can register your
project again.

Regards,
Jaime