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Re: [avr-libc-dev] [RFC] Licensing information


From: E. Weddington
Subject: Re: [avr-libc-dev] [RFC] Licensing information
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:25:43 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.3 (Windows/20040803)

Theodore A. Roth wrote:

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, E. Weddington wrote:

Hello All!

Ok, it's time to bite the bullet.

The LICENSING and AUTHORS file have not been adequate. People who use
avr-libc and want to put proper attribution in their docs, don't know
what to put in because the LICENSING file is confusing. And the AUTHORS
file was not up-to-date.

Attached are IMO what the LICENSING and AUTHORS file should be.

The AUTHORS file contains the list of project administrators (current)
and a list of authors: determined by anyone who has a copyright on a
file in the project. If we wanted to, we could also put in a list of
*contributors*: anybody who has submitted a patch that has been accepted.

The LICENSING file was completely overhauled. It now contains a true
copyright *statement*, not just a template. All of the copyright years
and authors have been combined. There is a note in the file to see the
individual source files for more information. It is noted that
*portions* of avr-libc are copyright by <the list of authors>.  I feel
that this a reasonable compromise that executes the spirit of the
licensing, and importantly it allows users a means of attribution, which
I feel is the important premise of this file. And for the record, IANAL.

It is also important to note, that avr-libc has *two licenses* governing
the source. Most of the math library by Michael Stumpf is actually a GPL
+ exception license. This is now reflected in the LICENSE file. It would
be nice if this was eventually relicensed to BSD - advertising clause,
or a substitute could be found that could be licensed as that. Since
this references the GPL, I think that we should add a file to the
project, GPL, that contains the GPL license that Michael Stumpf refers to.

Now to the big problem: The original license file said that avr-libc was
a Modified BSD License (with the No Advertising clause). However the
"template" that it gave for new authors, only showed the original two
clauses of the BSD license. It did NOT contain the No Advertising
clause. Hence there are a lot of new files (for example headers in the
include/avr directory) that have the 2 clause license. Compare this with
libc/string/memcpy.S which has the proper 3-clause, no advertising BSD
license. So, we're going to have to contact a bunch of copyright holders
and get them to approve a license change. I'm willing to take this on if
the admins agree. I would imagine that it would be best to make sure to
CC avr-libc-dev so the author approvals of copyright change are archived
for posterity.

Note, that I've changed the LICENSE file to show the 3-clause BSD license.

Eric


Sounds fine. Can you generate a patch implementing your solution and
post it so we can see exactly what the changes will look like?


I attached brand new files to that post so you can see what they look like. The changes are so extensive that the patch will look pretty ugly, but I can do it if you really want to see it.

Eric




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