Re: preferred copyright notice?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Eric,

    Which one do I follow?  

For GNU packages, the recommendation is to use "GNU <program>" stuff as
in maintain.texi, but there is some leeway for those who feel strongly
the other way.

    but is different than what the GPL suggests

Clearly the GPL can't talk about GNU packages specifically.

    my understanding is that it is not a violation of the GPL to
    distribute files with different wording in the header

Right.

    maintain.texi needs some explanation added making it explicit that
    FSF packages should follow the suggestions in maintain.texi instead
    of those directly in the GPL?

Well, the whole purpose of maintain.texi is to give guidelines for GNU
packages ...  Also, the very next thing in maintain.texi is:

    But in a small program which is just a few files, you can use
    this instead:

    @quotation
    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    ...

I'm not sure what more can be said.

    Is it "free software:" or "free software;"?  

: seems better to me.

    Do we need the phrase "of the License" as suggested by gpl-3.0.texi?
    I'm leaning towards the GPL wording here, so maintain.texi might
    need a fix.
    
I see no reason not to use the GPL wording.  I changed maintain.

    since it does not break up the name "GNU General Public License".  

Well, I see your point, but I don't want to take up rms' time with this
-- and I don't really see a huge reason to be finicky about line breaks
in the Texinfo source when we don't try to control the line breaks in
the output.  It's formatted as it is simply because that's what my
fill-paragraph did :).

    Finally, gpl-3.0.texi has a texinfo markup of the URL, 

When a manual that includes gpl*.texi is generated, it seems nice to
have a real link.  I changed maintain to use @url too.

Thanks,
Karl