etags licence?

etags licence?

[Ulrich Mueller]

I just discovered that the etags.c included with Emacs 22 is now
dual-licenced BSD/GPL, while up to Emacs 21.4 it was GPL only.

As a consequence, this would mean that Gentoo has to mark its Emacs
packages with "GPL-3 FDL-1.2 BSD" as licence info.

Some quick web search reveals that the ctags source was posted at
least two times to net.sources and mod.sources in 1984/85, without any
copyright statement. (This version clearly shows similarities to the
etc/etags.c included in Emacs 16.56.)

I also found a posting by Ken Arnold from 1985 that states "The source
to ctags is public domain":
<http://groups.google.de/group/net.unix-wizards/browse_thread/thread/43a6b9daae705a7e/785d2b69b9ac7d6f?lnk=st&q=ctags&rnum=7&hl=de#785d2b69b9ac7d6f>

So I wonder if the BSD licensing for etags is correct?

Ulrich

Re: etags licence?

[Glenn Morris]

Ulrich Mueller wrote:

> I just discovered that the etags.c included with Emacs 22 is now
> dual-licenced BSD/GPL, while up to Emacs 21.4 it was GPL only.

See the comments in notes/admin/copyright in CVS.

Re: etags licence?

[Glenn Morris]

Glenn Morris wrote:

> See the comments in notes/admin/copyright in CVS.

I meant to say admin/notes/copyright.

Re: etags licence?

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Sat, 25 Aug 2007, Glenn Morris wrote:

>> I just discovered that the etags.c included with Emacs 22 is now
>> dual-licenced BSD/GPL, while up to Emacs 21.4 it was GPL only.

> See the comments in notes/admin/copyright in CVS.

This mostly agrees with my findings. (Honestly, I hadn't read it
before. ;-)

But what about Ken Arnold's statement in his posting from 1985 that
ctags was "public domain"?

Ulrich

Re: etags licence?

[Richard Stallman]

    But what about Ken Arnold's statement in his posting from 1985 that
    ctags was "public domain"?

It could be that that could allow us to drop the revised BSD license,
but I don't see that we would gain very much by doing so.

Re: etags licence?

[Jeremy Maitin-Shepard]

Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> writes:

> I just discovered that the etags.c included with Emacs 22 is now
> dual-licenced BSD/GPL, while up to Emacs 21.4 it was GPL only.

> As a consequence, this would mean that Gentoo has to mark its Emacs
> packages with "GPL-3 FDL-1.2 BSD" as licence info.

Presumably Gentoo, or any other distribution, does not "have" to do
this, but rather is doing it as a courtesy to its users: I assume the
string "GPL-3 FDL-1.2 BSD" means that all of the contents of the package
are available under at least one of those licenses.  If that is the
case, though, then the string "GPL-3 FDL-1.2" would also be correct, and
more significantly, I doubt any users actually care that portions of the
emacs package are also licensed under BSD.

[snip]

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard

Re: etags licence?

[Glenn Morris]

Jeremy Maitin-Shepard wrote:

> Presumably Gentoo, or any other distribution, does not "have" to do
> this, but rather is doing it as a courtesy to its users: I assume the
> string "GPL-3 FDL-1.2 BSD" means that all of the contents of the package
> are available under at least one of those licenses.

Some comments:

1. etags is not classed as "part of Emacs", if this is relevant.

2. there are some other files in the distribution that are under
   earlier versions of the GPL (eg in lwlib/).

3. there are some files under the MIT/X11 license (this may not be the
   "PC" term), in oldXMenu.

There may be other exceptions I have forgotten at the moment. Anyway,
I think it is right to say that everything that is a proper "part of
Emacs" is GPLv3 or later.

Re: etags licence?

[Glenn Morris]

Glenn Morris wrote:

>> string "GPL-3 FDL-1.2 BSD" means that all of the contents of the package
>> are available under at least one of those licenses.
>
> Some comments:

[...]

Following up to myself... It depends what that string is supposed to
mean. If it does mean: "every file in this package is under one or
more of these licenses", then it isn't even true as it stands, thanks
to the other exceptions I mentioned.

If it is just supposed to be a "summary" of the overall license for
the "Emacs package", then I don't think there is any problem just
saying that Emacs's code is under GPLv3, and the documentation is
under GFDLv1.2.

The copyright and license information for every file in Emacs is
clearly stated in the file itself or a README (AFAIK, please report
any exceptions!) so the fine detail is all there if people want that
level of information.

Re: etags licence?

[Christian Faulhammer]

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Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>:

> Glenn Morris wrote:
> >> string "GPL-3 FDL-1.2 BSD" means that all of the contents of the
> >> package are available under at least one of those licenses.
> > Some comments:
> [...]
> Following up to myself... It depends what that string is supposed to
> mean. If it does mean: "every file in this package is under one or
> more of these licenses", then it isn't even true as it stands, thanks
> to the other exceptions I mentioned.

 It means: "The files that will get installed by this ebuild are
licensed under one of the following conditions".  It is not important if
ctags is not considered part of Emacs, as long as the Emacs ebuild will
install it.  The LICENSE tag is there to let users filter by license so
they don't accidentally install non-free software, which is a feature
to be implemented though by the Gentoo package manager.

> The copyright and license information for every file in Emacs is
> clearly stated in the file itself or a README (AFAIK, please report
> any exceptions!) so the fine detail is all there if people want that
> level of information.

 The tag is there to give the user or package manager an overview
before he actually can read the files himself.

V-Li

-- 
Christian Faulhammer, Gentoo Lisp project
<URL:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-lisp on FreeNode

<URL:http://www.faulhammer.org/>

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Re: etags licence?

[Richard Stallman]

    2. there are some other files in the distribution that are under
       earlier versions of the GPL (eg in lwlib/).

Actually they say "or any later version".

Re: etags licence?

[Richard Stallman]

    > As a consequence, this would mean that Gentoo has to mark its Emacs
    > packages with "GPL-3 FDL-1.2 BSD" as licence info.

If the idea is that that lists all licenses found anywhere in the
package, I guess it is right.  Except that they should write GPL-3+
since Emacs is released under "GPL version 3 or any later version".

However, in practical terms the license for etags.c is GPLv3.

Note that there is also code in Emacs under an old X license
in the directory oldXMenu.