Re: [Bug #976] Missing GPL exception and missing Copyright statements

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Sun, 2002-08-11 at 22:28, Etienne M. Gagnon wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 09:48:20PM +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > See the following two emails from the archive:
> > http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/classpath/2002-May/002287.html
> > http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/classpath/2002-May/002335.html
> 
> So, if I understand correctly from the second message, the rmic
> generated files can be GPL+exp.  So, I'll go ahead and fix them
> as well as all the other generated files.

For files that have both the master and generated file in the Classpath
CVS tree that is OK. But for files like the LocaleInformation files you
really should first track down licenses of the original master files.
The reason I never changed them was because Tom did not clearly indicate
what the original license was and I haven't made the time to check it.
In the end though Brain and Paul decide these copyright/licensing issues
since they are the official maintainers.

> As the generating scripts don't seem to be called that often, I'll
> simply hack the copyright statement directly in the files, and let
> maintainers fix the scripts, eventually.
Could you add a statement to the scripts stating this and/or add a bug
to Savannah? Otherwise we might accidentally override them again without
the license notice.

> I just want the copyright statements to be in place for a new SableVM
> distribution.  A Debian developer noticed the incoherency in the
> copyright statements of the current
> sablevm-native/class-library-*.tar.gz files (which are directly
> derived from GNU Classpath).

You can always trust the Debian maintainers to be strict in these kinds
of things. Which is a good thing IMHO. Since people seem to be really
using Classpath now we might want to think about making an official
(non-alpha) release somewhere later this year.

If SableVM makes it into Debian you might also want to promote it a bit
by responding to the following thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200208/msg00055.html
Some of the Debian maintainers seem to really want to get some GPL
incompatible but free software (mostly licensed under the APL) into
Debian main. But since Kaffe is GPLed there is some discussion how to do
this properly. Why they don't just use gcj is beyond me, but they seem
to want to use a more traditional byte code interpreter.
(The best solution would of course be to get the original programs GPL
compatible but that might be to much work since getting the Apache
license GPL compatible seems to be something that everybody has wanted
for years but nobody ever really made it so.)

Cheers,

Mark