On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 08:59:37PM +0100, Cl??ment Lassieur wrote:
     I had a look at the source of the recently commited "unrar" package, and
     I could not find neither "copyright" lines nor pointers to the full
     notice, except in unrarlib.h and unrarlib.c, which belong to a different
     project.  IANAL, but according to GPLv2 and
     https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html, those things are
     mandatory, COPYING is not enough.  So I think the "unrar" package
     contains proprietary code.

I think you are mistaken.

Yes,  the package does not explicitly have headers in the way that GNU recommends.
But I do not see how such a recommendation is "mandatory". (It's mandatory for
gnu programs, but there are many non-gnu programs in Guix)

The placement of COPYING  - whilst normally not all that we would like - is
part performance of an intent  to licence the software.

Like you say, the authors have taken GPL code from another project and incorporated
it into unrar - that is only possible if the the resultant work is GPL compatible.

Also if you look at the site where it is hosted https://gna.org/projects/unrar you
will see that it says: License: GNU General Public License V2 or later.


So, whilst it has been poorly executed, I believe there is ample evidence that this 
program is licenced GPL.

J'


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