Re: [Bug-gnulib] missing licenses in gnulib

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> The program that generates lbrkprop.h is GPL'ed, but none of this
> GPL'ed code survives in lbrkprop.h.  lbrkprop.h merely consists of a
> small wrapper (about 15 lines of simple code, which are unprotectible
> by copyright in my opinion) followed by data which are automatically
> derived from the Unicode Data Files.

I disagree. The struct definition, although only 7 lines in size, is
tricky and certainly copyrightable.

> Since pure data are not protected by copyright, and since the wrapper
> is so small as to be uncopyrightable, I think the entire file is in
> the public domain.

I don't want it to give it away in public domain; instead I've added
the GPL copyright notice to it now. Since the module description says
LGPL, it effectively means the file is under LGPL.

> For example, Bison is
> GPLed, but Bison puts a copyright notice (the GPL with a special
> exception) into the source-code files that it generates automatically.
> Users are of course free to modify Bison to emit a different license,
> but if they redistribute the resulting output in violation of the
> Bison terms, they are still in violation of Bison's license.

Why would this be a violation of Bison's license? Because the bison
output contains a significant portion of bison code (not just data
generated from the input files and the DFA)?

Bruno