Re: RFC: proposed GPLv3 license exception draft

[Russ Allbery]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

> "Eligible Output Material" is Covered Code that is included in the
> standard, minimally verbose, non-debugging and non-tracing output of
> the version of Autoconf distributed to you under this License.
> Moreover, "Eligible Output Material" may be comprised only of Covered
> Code that (a) must necessarily appear in Autoconf-generated configure
> scripts and (b) is required for those configure scripts to function.

Reading this with non-lawyer eyes, (a) and (b) sound concerning.  I may
be reading them too literally, but a lot of output in a configure script
doesn't meet "must necessarily appear"; I could, for instance, not call
some macros or choose some other Autoconf programming technique that
causes that code to not appear.

Similarly, there's lots of stuff in a configure script that's not
strictly "required for those configure scripts to function," such as all
embedded shell comments.

> You have permission to propagate output of Autoconf, even if such
> propagation would otherwise violate the terms of GPLv3.

Is there something that defines "propagate" to include creation and
distribution of derivative works?  The current exception permits
configure scripts to be patched and redistributed in patched form.  It's
not a great idea, but it's sometimes a useful workaround.

On a technical side, does this mean that the output of Autoconf can be
covered under some other license, or is it still under the GPL v3?  If
it's under the GPL v3, that's rather annoying, since it would require
shipping a copy of the GPL v3 with packages that use Autoconf scripts
but which don't otherwise have any GPL material.

My ideal would be to be able to include somehow in my configure.ac the
license text that I want to write into the configure script, together
with whatever boilerplate Autoconf itself needs to add.  I would
strongly prefer to not have to include additional long licenses in
packages that don't otherwise use them.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>