Re: [Savannah-hackers] Re: flex project on savannah?

[Jeff Bailey]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 07:47:34PM +0000, Jaime E. Villate wrote:

> You can see that flex and other non-GNU packages such as Maxima are there
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/maxima also exists).
> Jeff has much more experience than the two of us with the GNU project
> policies, so if he does not see a problem with
> http://www.gnu.org/software/flex/ I'm sure RMS has approved it.

It's more likely to be historical baggage.  Flex has been on the GNU
servers longer than I've been around.

The hard part is transitioning historical packages.  Which software/flex
could easily contain a redirect, that wouldn't help the mailing lists.

Hmmm.  Taking a look at the license, it's a BSD license with an
advertising clause.  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html indicates
that the University of California, Berkeley agreed to remove the
advertising clause from their licenses, so it could be removed easily
enough.  That should eliminate the GPL incompatibility to my non-lawyer
eyes.

Perhaps flex might be best served by simply asking to be a GNU project? 
Copyright assignment isn't required these days (although I still like to
do it).  You could either go ahead and make it GPL from here, or perhaps
dual-license it like Perl, Mozilla and Ghostscript have done.  Then it
would remove any hassle about the mailing lists and web pages which
already exist for your project.

Will, what do you think?

Tks,
Jeff Bailey