Re: GPL v3 survey site

Stephen> No. You can't change the license without permission of the Stephen> author. We need to look at the files and see whether we can Stephen> be reasonably sure that the authors intended GPLvN or later, Stephen> [...] Well that is for the relicense solution. There are alternatives to that like, remove, replace with version from Emacs or complete rewrite that doesn't require authors approval. I'm not suggesting that this should be our primary alternative but in some cases it might be what we have to do. But I think Jerry is right that we should do the inventory first. Why fight over our theoretical options. Lets look at the real options first given by the state of each file. Stephen> We also need to think about the documentation screwage (eg, Stephen> the invariant GPLv1 mess). Huh... I know. I prefer sticking the head in the sand here. Can't we just keep that for now and solve it later after the code has moved to GPLv3? Stephen> No, that is not a problem. As long as all files have a Stephen> GPLv3-compatible license, they can be in a distribution we Stephen> distribute under GPLv3. [...] OK. So we need not go all the way to GPLv2 before doing the change. The better. It is enough to have a GPLv3 compatible license. We should keep that in mind doing the inventory. I don't think though we have many files in this category. Stephen> No. If we don't have a license, we can't distribute it anyway. We Stephen> are assuming that we do have a license already. This is just a good Stephen> opportunity to straighten things out. The question is what permission Stephen> notice do we put there? I'm not sure what you mean here. If a file that is unlicensed can't be relicensed to GPLv3 or later and it can't be distributed without a license it seems like it must be replaced!? But that is not what you are saying!? Stephen> You can do anything you want in a private repository, [...] Just changing the notices is the easy task. And yes that can be started now on the GPLv2 or later files for instance. I think my script also will do just that automatically as well if we would like to do it that way. Doing it manually isn't that hard either. But I think quite a few files will need to be changed in more ways than just the notice part. These changes ought to be reviewed and introduced in an incremental way so that we don't get many bugs at once. So these changes should go into the repo for test and review. Just a thought: It seems ironical if you must do a GPLV3 or later change in isolation. The end should justifies the means in this case I think. If a few people cooperate in doing the switch and it is done over a limited time using a none public repo... Yours -- %% Mats _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta