Proposal for e-mail to SC list about licensing questions for libquad.

[Tobias Schlüter]

On 2010-09-06 19:13, Toon Moene wrote:
> The problem I currently have is that it is hard to *prove* that fdlibm
> and gdtoa are distributed under the BSD license (and exactly which one)
> - I cannot find a document that contains the exact license text.

from a random fdlibm file:
/*
  * ====================================================
  * Copyright (C) 2004 by Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
  *
  * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this
  * software is freely granted, provided that this notice
  * is preserved.
  * ====================================================
  */

Is that not sufficient?  Likewise you can find the two-clause BSD 
licence of gdtoa in the source files you linked to.  As for Cephes, 
that's not owned by the FSF, but it's used in glibc IIUC.  I've not dug 
deeper, but given that it's on netlib, you will find the licence in the 
source code.

I think the real problem, as far as the FSF is concerned, is: what 
licence shall we put the parts of the library that we (i.e. FX) wrote 
ourselves?  GPL + exception, probably, as the FSF always wants the 
strongest licence that fits the purpose.  But this infers the question: 
if Cephes was modified in glibc, can we import the changes and relicence 
under GPL + e?

Cheers,
- Tobi