Mats Lidell writes: If the script looks for the "standard permission notice", rather than just the words "General Public License, version 2 or later", I don't see why there's a problem. That fails safe. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Jerry James <james(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: So while waiting for various builds to complete and tests to run this morning, I did the etc and man directories. So all that is left now is the tests directory. -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/ _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: Tricky. I think it is your choice to pick a license (actually, any license at all, not restricted to free licenses if I remember the assignment contract), but the FSF would be free to relicense _their_ copies with a free license (what that means is also defined in the assignment contract) of their choice. Of course, it makes no sense to pick a license that the FSF would likely override in their copies, in order to avoid forks. So far it does not look like they'd bother distributing anything in the tests (heck, in all of XEmacs) at all, let alone relicensed. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: You mean GPL v2 or later, right? Okay,. I'll update the pages. I did the tests directory last night, so the initial survey is done. Now comes the hard part: figuring out which of the potential problem items are really problems, and deciding what to do about them. If anyone has information to add to these pages showing that some items are not problematic, post away! -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/ _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: I haven't used a Sun machine since about 1997. Since I seem to be into virtual machines these days, I should make myself a virtual OpenSolaris machine. No, their ChangeLogs don't have notices. My first impulse was to exclude those files from consideration, but then I couldn't come up with a reason why it would be okay to do that. If someone has a plausible legal theory, I'm all ears. -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/ _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

Rodney Sparapani writes: What you can get fined for if the judge gets sufficiently annoyed at the waste of his time is called "frivolous". Other than pissing off the judge, as far as I know nothing in law is considered "silly". :-) Something like that is probably true (see below), but Jerry is right to be careful. (a) There's no problem in principle in having multiple licenses apply to different parts of the same collective work (indeed, the collective can have a separate license from any of the parts), and (b) remember we're talking about the Free Software Forcefeeding here. "Everybody has a right to use my software freely, as long as they conform to my way." The derivative authors *do not* have a choice of license if the original is copyleft. I suspect the real argument is that the ChangeLog is not an expressive Work in itself, but rather a collection of independent snippets, none of which is big enough to be a copyright issue (Ben's megalogs notwithstanding? I wonder...). Nor is the organization of those snippets copyrightable, any more than the alphabetical order in the telephone book. Bottom line is, I'll ask the FSF's license people. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Mats Lidell <matsl(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: I'd like to quote Indiana Jones: "I don't know. I'm making this up as I go along." :-) We still need to coordinate to avoid duplicate work, yes. I'm happy to coordinate if nobody else wants the task. I think before we start patching anything, we should identify the complete list of problem files and the action to be taken for each. All I did was an initial survey to see what I could find about the license status of each file. My information is incomplete. So now we get to start digging to see what else we can discover. Some people may have old mailing list messages that give license information, for example. We may have to poke some former developers (if we can find them) to get an explicit license statement out of them. -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/ _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

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

Jerry James writes: We can change the permissions to a subset of the licenses we received. Eg, we could do something like "GPLv2 or later, provided that the major version is *even* and the minor version is 1 or greater." (Speaking of silly....) In particular, we can stop distributing under GPLv2 (and must if we wish to sync FSF code, since they no longer grant GPLv2 licenses, and so those won't be in the set of licenses we receive from them). The point is that "GPL, v2 or later" is not a single license, it is a *set* of licenses, each of which individually gives us permission to redistribute under that license and that license only. Ie, to state that extensionally, GPLv2 is in "GPL, v2 or later", so we have a GPLv2 license, and we can grant that license to our downstream. GPLv3 is also in "GPL, v2 or later", so we have and can grant that one, too, or not, as we please. We can do either or both, but until GPLv4 is published, we can't distribute unless we choose one of GPLv2 or GPLv3, since XEmacs contains code licensed to us only under "GPL, v2 or later". We can't use a license that is not in the intersection of all copyleft licenses we have received for code in our derivative work. If that intersection is empty, we can't distribute. More silliness: we could, in theory, distribute under "GPL, v4 or later", but since that hasn't been published yet, nobody can do anything but run XEmacs with it (according to the FSF theory that running a program is not regulated by copyright). _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta