Re: [Savannah-hackers] submission of NetHack Proxy - savannah.nongnu.org

[J. Ali Harlow]

On 17/12/04 03:02:14, Jonathan Gonzalez V. wrote:
> "J. Ali Harlow" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Hi J. Ali Harlow,
>
> First at all, apologies for the delay in my answer.

Seemed pretty fast to me.

> Related to the tarball, you have a lot of documentation, consider to
> licensed under the GNU FDL, you can read more about the GNU FDL in
> these URLs:
>
>       http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-howto.html
>       http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html#SEC4

I can see this is going to get complicated! Following the  
recommendation in fdl.html#SEC4, I would want to release any example  
code under parallel licenses (ie., both the LGPL and the NGPL) so that  
my upstream users could include the code in their packages regardless  
of whether they are relying on the NGPL or the LGPL.

Things are further complicated by the fact that quite a bit of the  
documentation that you see so far is auto-generated by gtk-doc (my  
changes so far have been limited to nhproxy-sections.txt, nhproxy- 
docs.sgml, tmpl/prxyclnt.sgml with various trivial tweaks to the other  
files in tmpl).

Finally, gtk-doc works by extracting documentation from the code  
(though I haven't written any yet). Thus the majority of the meat of  
the documentation will presumably be covered by the LGPL/NGPL licenses  
anyway. I'm not clear how this affects the licensing of the reference  
manual as a whole.

The NhExt specification (in doc/ext_protocol.html), on the other hand,  
is based on a document released solely under the NGPL and will  
therefore presumably itself have to be released only under that  
license.

> You cannot use a range of years in the Copyright Notices, consider to
> fix this.

Yes, I realised that this was going to be a problem while I was reading  
the savannah-hackers archive. It's going to take a while to trace back  
in CVS to find which years actually apply, but I understand I need to  
do this.

> You have to include the License Notices of GNU LGPL, you cannot avoid
> this. You can reference the NGPL writing the COPYING POLICIES section
> at the end of the LGPL notices, or if you prefer, in this case you
> can point to the user to license.txt.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you suggesting that I use  
something like this:

---------------------------- CUT ----------------------------
This file is part of NetHack Proxy.

NetHack Proxy is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

NetHack Proxy is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with NetHack Proxy; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307   
USA

Alternatively (at your option) you may instead choose to redistribute
and/or modify NetHack Proxy under the terms of the NetHack General
Public License.

You should have receieved a copy of the NetHack General Public License
along with NetHack Proxy; if not, download a copy from
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nethack.php
---------------------------- CUT ----------------------------

> Related to this point you have the 'COPYING.LIB' file missing, this  
> file should include a verbatim copy of the GNU LGPL that you can get  
> from here:
>
>       http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt

There is a verbatim copy of that file included as doc/LGPL.txt - if the  
location and name of the file is important to you I guess I could move  
it.

> If the "Slash'EM Development Team" doesn't not exist and you are the
> only developer on this project, you can change the copyright holder
> to you, but, if there's more than one developer in previous release,  
> you have to keep that copyright holder. If you still having doubts  
> about this point, you can check this URL to learn more about this  
> issue:
>       
> http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html

I'm not sure that this document address the issue in question, but  
still...

The Slash'EM Development Team certainly does exist. It currently  
consists of five people: Warren Cheung, Clive Crous, Paul Hurtley,  
Pekka Rousu and myself. However, as I say, I was the only person who  
contributed to any of the files which were previously part of Slash'EM  
and are now part of nhproxy. From a legal point of view, the question  
comes down to whether by choosing to attach a copyright notice to the  
files in question which named the Slash'EM Development Team as the  
copyright holder I would be deemed to have assigned the copyright to  
them or whether I, in fact, still hold the copyright and the notices  
should be corrected.

In any event, I'm quite happy for the notices to remain as they are as  
long as this will not cause any problems in the future.

> If you are willing to make the changes mentioned above, please
> provide us with an URL to an updated tarball of your project.  Upon  
> review, we will reconsider your project for inclusion in Savannah.

I will start work on fixing the dates in the copyright notices. I hope  
you don't mind if I ask for some clarification on the points I raise  
above before I make any more drastic changes.

Many thanks,

Ali.