Updating Automake to GPLv3

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Brett,

in 2007, we already tried to update GNU Automake to GPLv3,
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2007-07/msg00005.html>
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2007-08/msg00007.html>
which resulted in commits b9ff055d78ebdea1fdc038fa5304dbe3f9a51a7f
and its reversal fcf2f56062e384455ec8b1aed943af33f20c27c7 IIRC because
the exception had not been rewritten yet.

Now, Autoconf has moved.  Automake should hopefully be easier to handle.
The license situation in Automake is the following:

1) It provides a few helper scripts that contain this license header:

# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
# any later version.
#
[... standard GPLv2 blurb ...]
# As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you
# distribute this file as part of a program that contains a
# configuration script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under
# the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.


Does this need any changes except for changing the first paragraph to
this?

# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.


2) The Autoconf macro files m4/*.m4 are already all-permissive:

# Copyright (C) 200x...  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
#
# This file is free software; the Free Software Foundation
# gives unlimited permission to copy and/or distribute it,
# with or without modifications, as long as this notice is preserved.


3) aclocal generates aclocal.m4, automake generates Makefile.in files.
aclocal copies some of the m4/*.m4 files into its output, automake
copies some of the lib/am/*.am files into its output, transforming and
mangling them on the way.  The tools write these respective copyright
headers into their outputs:

# generated automatically by aclocal $VERSION -*- Autoconf -*-

# Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
# 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# This file is free software; the Free Software Foundation
# gives unlimited permission to copy and/or distribute it,
# with or without modifications, as long as this notice is preserved.

# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law; without
# even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
# PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

and

# Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
# 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009  Free Software Foundation,
# Inc.
# This Makefile.in is free software; the Free Software Foundation
# gives unlimited permission to copy and/or distribute it,
# with or without modifications, as long as this notice is preserved.

# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law; without
# even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
# PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

and possibly further copyright headers stemming from other input files.
These output files are intended to be usable by any project, with any
type of license.

4) Everything else has the standard GPLv2 header.


Do we need to change anything besides the change noted in (1), done for
all files?

Thanks,
Ralf