Mats Lidell writes: The license applies whether or not there's a statement in the file, simply because we distribute it as part of XEmacs. If you get a file of unknown source without a permission statement, you are dealing with potentially stolen goods. The point of putting permission statements in each file is to (1) give people a basis for assessing such legal risks if they receive a file split out from our distribution, and (2) to inform our users of files with better :-) licenses than GPLv3+. The license is stated in almost every file in the distribution; there is no legal requirement for us to list individual files explicitly. It is a convenience for our users, and for any copyright-holder who wished to enforce their copyrights. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta

Mats Lidell writes: If we are going to have a per-directory README file anyway, that would be OK, I guess. I think it's a gratuitous maintenance burden, though, unless the file's copyright holder wants to grant a different license. In particular, note that if the file gets separated from the XEmacs distribution, that README almost certainly will not be distributed with the file. Rather than list all files that can't have an embedded notice, I would say: The files in this directory, unless otherwise noted below under EXCEPTIONS, are part of XEmacs and distributed to you under the [GPL], as described here: [Standard permissions notice] EXCEPTIONS Some authors request that we explain that their code may be distributed separately under more permissive terms than the rest of XEmacs. Where possible, each file has an embedded notice; please reference those for exceptional terms. The following files, which do not contain embedded permissions notices for technical reasons, are licensed to XEmacs and to you by their owners under the following licenses: "MIT License" <URL:http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit> ---------------------------------------------------------- file1 by J. Random Hacker I would like to rename the COPYING file to LICENSE or GPL, and name the per-directory permissions files as described above COPYING. I don't know if we actually need per-directory READMEs explaining what the directory is used for in most cases. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta