Re: gnulib's licensing

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/03/11 16:08, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> I assume the licensing for gnulib arises from standard GNU policy; I
> just wonder if the portability parts may be a case for an exception.

A few parts of gnulib are so trivial that they could perhaps be
made exceptions.  I think it unlikely, though, that there would
be a lot of exceptions.  Much of gnulib is stolen from glibc, or is
based on a similar kind of library philosophy, and the GNU project
is reasonably clear and strict about what their licensing goals are
in this area.

For 'file', perhaps you could treat the existing 'file' program
as a core, meant to run only on its existing host set, and then
use gnulib to build a portable version of 'file' that can run
on more hosts.  This would be akin to how the OpenSSH folks do
their thing.  The portable version would be GPLed, the core
version BSDed.  It's not clear to me whether this would be worth
the hassle, though.

> also of the opportunities, in both directions,
> for getting portability code out of programs such as OpenSSH and into
> gnulib.

OpenSSH uses a BSD license, no?  So one direction is already open, and
I assume we'd welcome improvements to gnulib along those lines.  The other
direction doesn't sound plausible, I'm afraid.