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

[B. Fallenstein]

Hi Loic!

Thanks for your considerance, but I think I need a little more help with
the license statements.

Loic Dachary wrote:
>         I'm a bit confused with the license of Ly. The tarbal contains
> the GPL, the LGPL and XPL.

And the FDL. Here is how *I* understand the situation:
- The source code to the program itself (in the src/ directory)
  is under the GPL.
- The documentation in the doc/ subdirectory is under the FDL.
- The examples in the examples/ subdirectory are under various
  free licenses, among them the LGPL/XPL dual license.

The reason for the latter is that the examples in question are taken
from real-life programs (GZigZag, <http://www.gzigzag.org> in the case
of the latter) and I saw it as just an additional complication to
relicense them when including them in Ly (especially considering that I
update them in the Ly distribution when they're updated in GZigZag CVS).
Of course, I *could* relicense them under the GPL. However, as I would
also want to include other examples under other free licenses in the
examples/ subdirectory in the future, I would prefer a scheme that makes
it clear the files in this directory are under various licenses, and you
have to look into each source file to find out which license it's
published under.

Does this make sense? What should I do to make it clear?

> The files themselves do not contain a copyright
> or license notice and I can't figure out which license applies to them.

If this is indeed the case, please inform me which files fail to contain
either; to my knowledge, all files in the tarball should contain both.
(Checking a few examples, I do not find one source file that does not comply.)

I think confusion may be caused by the fact that I attach them at the
end of each file, not at the beginning, as is common practice. However,
there's a reason for this in the very nature of this beast: Programs in
the Ly distribution are expected to be read as HTML documents, not as
plain text, and the expectations for both are very different. Just as
one example, just about every article on www.gnu.org seems to have its
license notice at the end, and these are much *shorter* than the GPL
notice (no disclaimers). If I would start the documents with these
license notice, the first thing you'd see when pointing your browser to
the HTML would be that license notice-- extremely annoying.

However, I realize that the current approach is also problematic because
we expect copyright and license statement at the top of a file. Now, I
think putting a second copy there in an HTML comment would be bloat and
harder to update (and putting the information *only* there would mean it
wouldn't be included in the HTML document, which is expected to be the
primary form in which these files are viewed, so I can't do that).
However, I could surely include a comment along the lines of, "For
copyright and license information, please see the end of this file."
Does that make sense?

>         If you chose to use the GPL, could you please follow the instructions
> below and submit the project again when you're done ?

I thought I had. Indeed, on reviewing the text, I've found that it
explicitly allows putting copyright & license info in a different
position than the beginning of the file. (It does not *encourage* it,
mind, but I didn't chose this option because I think 'it should be like
that' or anything, but because I feel it's the best way *in my
particular situation*, for the reasons outlined above):

>   To do so, attach the following notices to the program.  It is safest
> to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively
> convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least
> the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.

So, what would you advise me to do?
- Benja