Re: xkblayout-state

[Chris Marusich]

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 08:15:23PM +0000, Gábor Boskovits wrote:
>> Sorry if I misunderstood, the intention of the author is clearly to licence
>> the work as gpl, but some files are missing the gpl clause. Also a copy of
>> the license is omitted. It is mandated by term 1 of gpl. If this partial
>> application of gpl makes this a free software, then sorry for the noise. In
>> case this software is ok for upstream, and is not packaged yet, then I
>> would be happy to contribute a package.
>
> Many (if not most) of our packages omit some license headers, so I don't
> think we should count that as a blocker.
>
> As for the missing LICENSE file, that's also suboptimal, but as you say,
> the author clearly intends to distribute the work as GPL2+.
>
> One could ask the author the include the LICENSE file, but I think we
> can go ahead with adding the software to Guix as it is now.
>
> What do you think? And others, do you think it's okay to go ahead with
> packaging this program?

As you said, it seems clear that the author intended this to be GPLv2+.
The REAMDE.md file states:

  License
  -------

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

  *xkblayout-state* 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
  General Public License for more
  details. <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>

I agree with Leo: I think it's reasonable to take the author at their
word and package this as GPLv2+.  At the same time, Gábor is also right:
to eliminate any shadow of doubt, the author should probably follow the
advice that Gábor gave.  Whoever packages the software should probably
contact the author and give them a friendly reminder about that.

-- 
Chris

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