Re: [Apertium-stuff] Incompatible License Mess

[Jim O'R. <jo...@gm...>]

On 24 July 2014 20:30, Kevin Brubeck Unhammer <unh...@fs...> wrote:
> Francis Tyers <ft...@pr...> writes:
>
>> A 2014-07-24 18:05, Jim O'Regan escrigué:
>>> On 24 July 2014 16:15, Anthony J. Bentley <an...@ca...> wrote:
>>
>> This has been a long thread:
>>
>> My opinion:
>>
>> 1) The PMC should make a policy to deal with licensing.
>
> +1
>
>> 2) In my opinion everything in the subversion repository should be dual
>> licensed GPLv3 (or later) and CC-BY-SA (the stuff in Apertium is
>> somewhere between data and code, so this makes sense).
>
> But I guess the code-not-data things like
> trunk/{apertium,lttoolbox,apertium-lex-tools} should only be
> GPLv3-or-later, not CC-BY-SA?
>

The parts of the code that I'm familiar with are mostly ok[1], and
there's nothing to gain by relicensing.

[1] There are missing headers in several files in apertium that
originated in hunalign. There is a note in AUTHORS about it.

>> In the meantime, my advice to Tino would be to not package stuff where
>> the licence is not clear. And forward specific examples to the PMC or
>> named authors for resolution.
>
> I don't think there's much data where the license (version) _is_
> clear :-/ (Can we really assume that no mention of "or later" in source
> files means that the version in COPYING is the correct and the only one,
> when most of those COPYING files were copied from some other pair or
> inserted automatically by autotools?)

To paraphrase what Anthony said earlier in the thread: when in doubt,
it's safest to take the most restrictive reading. To summarise the
earlier part of the thread, when there is no mention of 'or later'
(other than the example that the GPL contains in its aftermatter),
then there is no reasonable basis to assume 'or later'.

The version in COPYING is the correct one if (and only if) COPYING was
added by the authors. If not, they need to be consulted (or their
grant of permission noted in AUTHORS).

-- 
<Sefam> Are any of the mentors around?
<jimregan> yes, they're the ones trolling you