[armedbear-devel] Figuring out the provenance of trunk

[Mark Evenson]

On Jun 11, 2012, at 11:42 , Rudi Schlatte wrote:

> 
> On Jun 10, 2012, at 9:14 , Mark Evenson wrote:
> 
>> 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…
> 
> Taking SBCL code is not a problem as far as I can see.  SBCL is released into the public domain, except that LOOP (which carries a notice of provenance in ABCL) and PCL (which we do not use, our clos is based on Closette and carries the attributions) are BSD-licensed by MIT and Xerox / Gerd Moellman, respectively.  I believe a general acknowledgement in README and the manual would be in order, though.
> 
> ECL is released under the LGPL which doesn't create license conflicts with the GPL AFAIK, so if we keep attributions we should be ok.

Nice to have a plausible first-order explanation of the licensing terms: maybe it is not as much work as I feared.

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