Re: Import your CK macro into Guile?

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:
>
>> Apologies if I mishandled this, but the problem here is that the code
>> had no explicit license or copying permission notice.  If it had been
>> explicitly published as free software, I certainly would not have
>> bothered him about it.
>
> There are still two errors in the file:
>
>   1. There’s a line “copyright FSF”;
>
>   2. The file says to be GPLv3+.
>
> Could you fix that by removing the line and stating its actual license?
>
> My guess is that Oleg Kiselyov did not bother adding a license
> boilerplate that would be longer than the actual code, but that’s still
> a bit embarrassing.  Is there an official statement somewhere about its
> status?

As I wrote above, Oleg's code had no explicit license or copying
permission notice.  I took 15 lines of his code, which is not "legally
significant" according to my reading of the GNU maintainers guile.  I
then reworked the code to use an auxillary macro instead of the
string-literal hack.  For that reason I added the FSF copyright.  I then
sent Oleg a copy of the file that I proposed for inclusion (with the FSF
copyright and the GPLv3+ notice) and asked him if he'd be willing to
contribute it to Guile, calling his attention to the attached file.  He
agreed in a message sent to the guile-devel mailing list.

I would have handled this situation more carefully if the code was
legally significant.

What did I do wrong?

   Regards,
     Mark