[armedbear-devel] Figuring out the provenance of trunk

[Mark Evenson]

Over the course of maintaining the Bear, it has become clear to me that 
we have pieces of code in trunk whose original licensing terms indicate 
that their author should be contacted as to their status, especially 
when they would conflict with the terms we distribute under, namely 
those of the GNU Public License.

Recently I discovered such a licensing lacunae [in working with Jorge 
Tavares to patch the CL:SORT and CL:STABLE-SORT routines][1], that 
'sort.lisp' contains code that has both SBCL and ECL code attributions. 
  Are we in violation of anything here?  Dunno.  But we certainly have 
*lots* of SBCL tucked into our tree…

We obviously need an estimate of our non-compliance.  As a first step, 
it seems useful to construct/use a tool that allows us to establish 
provenance of all commits to ABCL trunk.  With this history in hand, we 
can start figuring out the set of all authors to work through potential 
conflicts.

A fair amount of work for a non-specialist, but anyone who does this 
regularly should have an analysis toolset lying around that they could 
apply to [ABCL trunk][2].

Is there a language lawyer geek in the house?

[1]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/ticket/196
[2]: https://code.google.com/p/abcl-dynamic-install/source/browse/

-- 

"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there is 
nothing to compare it to now."