Re: Release status 1.6.1 (2002-05-16)

[Marius Vollmer]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:

> This may be a little more work than I thought.  I'll probably commit
> an initial LICENSE, and then we can work from there to flesh it out.

Ok, thanks!

> From an initial rough pass, using the following command, I can see
> that we have a substantial number of non GPL+exception files (do we
> have any files not covered under either the GPL or GPL+exception?)

Yes, qthreads and (the original) psyntax.ss are not covered by the
GPL, for example.

> There's also at least one file, libguile/mkstemp.c, that's not covered
> under the exception that probably should be :/

Yes, good catch.

> Looks like there are about 100 files not covered under the exception.
> Though we may want to explicitly list them in LICENSE, we may also
> want a passage in there about the overall *intent* of the exception,
> i.e. that it's supposed to be safe to link even non-gpled apps against
> Guile in most cases, or similar.

The intent is more important than the list of files without the
exception, I'd say.  The LICENSE file is only there to inform users in
a broad and global way, the details can be left to the individual
files.

> Also, as opposed to explicit individual file listing, we might be able
> to substantially simplify the contents of LICENSE if we're willing to
> stick to some policies wrt non-GPL+exception files that we can list
> like:
> 
>   All .h or .c files outside of srfi or libguile are GPL.
>   All Makefile.am files are GPL.
>   All example .c and .h files are GPL
> 
> This would limit the number of individual files we have to list.

Yes, that's a good alternative.  We should make it clear, however,
that LICENSE is not the definite license statement of these files.