Re: [Groff] groff's license file COPYING

[Bernd Warken]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 07:47:02PM -0500, Alejandro López-Valencia wrote:
> I apologize for my pedantry, but babelization is the downfall of
> civilization, and I've had close encounters of the fourth kind[1]
> with US lawyers... See below.
> 
> >From reading the GPL, the text in the LICENSE file should be...:
> 
> """
>     groff - The classic UNIX text processing package.
>     Copyright (C) 1997-2004 Free Software Foundation (FSF).
> 
>     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 of the License,
> or
>     (at your option) any later version.
> 
>     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
>     but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
>     MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
>     GNU General Public License for more details.
> 
>     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
> License
>     along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
>     Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA
> 02111-1307  USA
> 
> <and here a short note>
> You will find a copy of the GPL in the file COPYING at the top of
> the unpacked source code distribution.
> <and here a short note />
> """"
> 
> If I recall correctly, James Clark donated groff to the FSF in 1997,
> but please do correct me if I am wrong.
> 
> [1] That is, wining and dining... :-)
> 

I'm not totally sure whether I understood everything you mean.

It is a bad idea to speak about UNIX.  This name was legally robbed
and sold.  Its changing owners still provide lots of trouble.

The groff project is part of GNU, so the copyright of all files goes 
to the FSF.  To mention this in the LICENSE file makes sense.  So I
propose to add the following to the end of the LICENSE file.

### last paragraph of LICENSE
...

Additionally to specifying a license, the law forces to give a
copyright to each file.  As the groff program is a GNU project, all
files of the groff source package are copyrighted to the Free Sofware
Foundation (FSF). Information on GNU and FSF is found at
http://www.fsf.org/.
### end of LICENSE

Bernd Warken