Re: Licence terms of libstdc++-v3/porting.texi

[Richard Stallman <rms at gnu dot org>]

    I wonder sometimes about the exact legal status of licensing. Just putting
    text into a file does not create a licensing or copyright statement of
    legal fact.

It does, if the person making the statement is legally authorized to
decide the policy.

    But it is unclear to me where the definitive licensing and copyright
    statements can be found. For GNAT Professional (as licensed directly
    to our paying customers, we provide a formal statement of licensing
    conditions, stating that the GPL applies etc etc) But it is not clear
    to me there is any such statement that applies to the entire GNU
    project. 

We put a statement of the license into each program because the
licenses are not all the same.  I don't think that a single global
statement would be more authoritative, or more useful.  And worst of
all, it could get out of sync with the packages themselves.