[darcs-users] darcs patch: relicense Darcs.Commands.GZCRCsas BSD3

[Trent W. Buck]

"Sittampalam, Ganesh" <ganesh.sittampalam at credit-suisse.com> writes:

> Trent W. Buck wrote:
>> Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:
>> 
>>> We actually have a file of license exceptions in the release/
>>> directory that we could tidy up.
>> 
>> Debian has a draft specification[0] for a file format that describes
>> licensing and copyright status for all files in a project.  If
>> upstream (i.e. this community) used the same format, that'd make my
>> life easier. The specification includes some examples.  
>
> There doesn't seem to be a way of describing licensing based on splits
> other than files,

Granted.

> which is the main thing that the license exceptions file is trying to
> document.

Well, currently it documents what license(s) each contributor is
prepared to use.  Anyone who then wants to use a module from Darcs'
codebase then has to work out which contributors worked on which files.

It'd be nice if we could also start listing any files where we CAN
declare a particular license, because all contributors to the file to
date have agreed to a particular license.

This would also tell us where the "problem areas" of the code are, as
far as licensing is concerned.  If we can see that an uncontactable
contributor only has a couple of lines, we could replace those lines
rather than chasing down the contributor.

> As far as Debian is concerned, just assuming GPL for the entire codebase
> is fine (because all the licensing we do have is GPL-compatible).

This is not strictly true.  I am required by policy to document the
license of all work within the upstream tarball.  Even if "they can be
treated like they are GPLd", this is not relevant.