Libiberty license roundup (questions/potential problems)

[DJ Delorie]

> Looking at libiberty, it seems to be under a mass of different
> licences.

Yup.  It will probably stay that way, too, because changing copyright
terms is *very* difficult.

> The fourth are the various files which aren't sure what they're part
> of; I'd like permission to just fix those all to claim to be part of
> libiberty, unless there's some reason not to.

The reason is, only the original author can change the copyright terms.

> The fifth is the question of why some are LGPL, some are GPL, some
> are GPL with linking exception, and one is LGPL with linking
> exception.  Effectively the library as a whole is under GPL in
> general, it would seem; what purpose do the other licenses serve?

Some have the exception because they're used in libstdc++, for
example.  There is no "library as a whole" as far as libiberty is
concerned; each source file has its own license, and that's pretty
much the end of the story, since there's little we can do about it.