Re: [3.2/3.3/HEAD] Make all the manuals unambiguously DFSG free

[Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot com>]

I skipped the part about the Ada manual and the GFDL, that's already
being fixed, based on communication between the FSF and the ACT folks.

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 11:40:29PM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> Must explicit FSF approval be given to add copyright and licence notices
> to files missing them?

The FSF's "copyright clerk" regularly conducts audits of copyright
statements and occasionally points out missing copyrights to the SC list
(and also tries to flag code that includes other code with an apparently
contradictory license).  We then fix them.

> (For example, the FSF says that any file than ten
> lines long, including such files as ChangeLogs, should have such notices -
> a simple permissive licence being appropriate for rough documentation such
> as ChangeLogs.)  Must it be given to add the libgcc exception to a libgcc
> file wrongly lacking it?  Must it be given to copy code from a non-libgcc
> file into libgcc?

For existing libraries, the FSF has already agreed to the general terms,
e.g. that libgcc has a certain license.  In cases like that, we already
have permission to fix files that lack the needed exception, because we're
just making things match what the FSF has already agreed to.

The point is that the FSF makes the macro-decision, and doesn't need to be
bothered with all the micro-decisions that follow from that (e.g. choosing
the license of 50 files that all form one library).

However, we need to be careful: if we want to take code out of library A
(with one license) and put it in library B (with another license), then
usually the SC will have to talk RMS into doing it, and sometimes this
can take quite a while.  Our latest issue was getting RMS to let us
relicense the C++ demangling function, since it had to make such a move.

Also, things that are clear to us (that language support libraries have to
have a less restrictive license than the GPL) may not be clear to RMS.
We had a knock-down drag-out fight for about a year to clean up the issues
surrounding the Java awt licensing situation.