Hi Bruno, You're the one who started this ;-) so I have to ask: Do you really think getting a formal assignment from anyone for such a small function (that's already been GPL'd for so long) is necessary? There is precedent with the *l.c math functions, which are copyright by Stephen L. Moshier and Sun Microsystems.
I'm happy to use Kamil's submission as-is, with a few small additions: listing provenance/spec paragraph, as Ian suggested, and previous authors/contributors. Considering all the email on the subject, it might have been less effort overall to reimplement from scratch. I'd like to resolve this soon, because it's blocking a coreutils beta release: sort's new --version-sort option is affected and I want the first coreutils beta release with that addition to have the definitive underlying comparator. Jim
