Re: [Savannah-hackers] Possible problem -- files with no licenses

[Jaime E. Villate]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 07:50:46PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> Apparently MacCX is hosted on Savannah as a non-GNU package and at
> present its files do not have any license notices in them.  (At least
> they did not have license notices when address@hidden evaluated
> it as a possible GNU package.)

I haven't been able to find that project in Savannah; do you have a URL
to its page?

> We have a policy about licenses for packages hosted on Savannah, and
> people agree they will use a GPL-compatible license.  But if they
> don't actually put such a license notice into the source files, 
> the files are not really free software.

Yes, we know that, and we warn people about it in the registration
process. Even after those warnings we carefully look at their files to make
sure they all have a license notice. It could happen sometime that one file
escapes us unnoticed or that some user uploads a new file without license
notice, but I'd say that those are rare occurrences. 

> Can we do anything to make sure that the source files of packages on
> Savannah actually contain license notices for free software licenses?

We ask maintainers to do that and we check the code they have when they
register their projects. Do you think we should inspect new files uploaded
after the registration? With so many projects it would have to be done by a
script and even then I think it would require some human help.

Regards,
Jaime