l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> Mark H Weaver <m...@netris.org> skribis:
>
>> Apologies if I mishandled this, but the problem here is that the code
>> had no explicit license or copying permission notice. If it had been
>> explicitly published as free software, I certainly would not have
>> bothered him about it.
>
> There are still two errors in the file:
>
> 1. There’s a line “copyright FSF”;
>
> 2. The file says to be GPLv3+.
>
> Could you fix that by removing the line and stating its actual license?
>
> My guess is that Oleg Kiselyov did not bother adding a license
> boilerplate that would be longer than the actual code, but that’s still
> a bit embarrassing. Is there an official statement somewhere about its
> status?
As I wrote above, Oleg's code had no explicit license or copying
permission notice. I took 15 lines of his code, which is not "legally
significant" according to my reading of the GNU maintainers guile. I
then reworked the code to use an auxillary macro instead of the
string-literal hack. For that reason I added the FSF copyright. I then
sent Oleg a copy of the file that I proposed for inclusion (with the FSF
copyright and the GPLv3+ notice) and asked him if he'd be willing to
contribute it to Guile, calling his attention to the attached file. He
agreed in a message sent to the guile-devel mailing list.
I would have handled this situation more carefully if the code was
legally significant.
What did I do wrong?
Regards,
Mark
