Ticket #12447 (needs_work defect)

Opened 16 months ago

Last modified 2 months ago

update the file COPYING.txt

Reported by: jhpalmieri Owned by: tbd
Priority: critical Milestone: sage-5.10
Component: packages: standard Keywords: COPYING.txt license
Cc: kcrisman Work issues: fix COPYING.txt
Report Upstream: N/A Reviewers:
Authors: Merged in:
Dependencies: Stopgaps:

Description

The file COPYING.txt in the top-level directory looks out-of-date to me: it is missing entries for a number of our spkgs (e.g. blas, boehm-gc, and boost-cropped, just for the first few in alphabetical order), and it has entries for some things we haven't distributed in years (like clisp and gnuplotpy). For the spkgs which still belong on the list, I also don't know how accurate the information is.

I'm attaching a small patch for the developer's guide about this, but the file COPYING.txt needs a lot of work.

Attachments

trac_12447-developer.patch Download (1.6 KB) - added by jhpalmieri 2 months ago.
main Sage library -- patch for developer's guide
trac_12447-root.patch Download (30.6 KB) - added by jhpalmieri 2 months ago.
root repo: incomplete patch

Change History

comment:1 Changed 16 months ago by jhpalmieri

  • Status changed from new to needs_review

comment:2 Changed 16 months ago by jhpalmieri

  • Status changed from needs_review to needs_work
  • Work issues set to fix COPYING.txt

comment:3 Changed 16 months ago by kini

From an email exchange between me and William in October: 

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 06:31, William Stein <wstein@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Keshav Kini <keshav.kini@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Saturday, October 1, 2011 10:28:28 AM UTC+8, William wrote:
>>>
>>> (2) Sage is GPLv3, which is a license that is perceived as very
>>> corporate unfriendly by many of the top companies that do commercial
>>> software.
>>
>> Last I checked, Sage was GPLv2+. This is stated in COPYING.txt in the root
>> directory of the latest dev version, too (4.7.2.alpha3). Has something
>> changed?
>
> The complete Sage distribution is GPLv3+.  The core Sage library
> (written in Python and Cython) is GPLv2+.   However, many of the
> components of Sage are GPLv3+.

So COPYING.txt should reflect this as well. Currently it says that everything in Sage is GPLv2+-compatible, which is wrong.

Changed 2 months ago by jhpalmieri

main Sage library -- patch for developer's guide

Changed 2 months ago by jhpalmieri

root repo: incomplete patch

comment:4 Changed 2 months ago by jhpalmieri

Here is an incomplete patch for COPYING.txt. I left a lot of "???" in the file, because I was too lazy to look at the spkg to figure out the licensing, or I looked and couldn't find it easily. I also didn't check all of the entries which are actually there; I got up to gcc, in the list at the beginning.

I am tempted to make this a blocker, since this file is very important from a legal point of view, isn't it?

comment:5 Changed 2 months ago by kcrisman

  • Cc kcrisman added
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