[cairo] COPYING files....

[Sean Middleditch]

On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 12:28 +0100, Egbert Eich wrote:
> Carl Worth writes:
>  > On Feb 6, Jim Gettys wrote:
>  >  > We need to put into place COPYING files for all the new modularized
>  >  > packages ASAP; some currently lack this.
>  > 
>  > The cairo COPYING files seem to be in place at least.
> 
> Each individual source file should bear a Copyright notice and a
> license information which in case of the MIT license text is
> customized with the copyright holder's name.
> Therefore I don't know how relevant a general COPYING file will be.
> If it is relevant at all it may not even be a good idea to have one
> - especially with the recent history in mind. 

The advantages of a COPYING file are that users can easily read the
license without digging in source files, that files which do not allow
easy embedding of COPYING notices can still have a license file (i.e.,
if you have a lot of PNGs or something else, where you'd prefer not to
embed huge text chunks), and for larger licenses (GPL) you only need to
refer the user to the COPYING file in the copyright headers of files,
versus copy the whole thing into the sources.

If the project has lots of different licenses in it, tho, the COPYING
file might not be the best idea, unless you include all the relevant
licenses.

You don't need the copyright notice in the copying file; just the
license.  Put the individual copyrights in the files themselves.  That
way you don't need 100 contributors listed in your COPYING file.

> 
>  > 
>  > 
>  > You can read between the lines and see that the default "strictness"
>  > is --gnu, not --foreign, and that --gnu does require a COPYING
>  > file. And there is the one phrase:
>  > 
>  > 	We still encourage software authors to distribute
>  > 	their work under terms like those of the GPL, but
>  > 	doing so is not required to use Automake.
>  > 
>  > But the behavior still feels rather sneaky to me.
>  > 
> 
> Automake was designed specifically to meet the needs to FSF projects.
> It is made to meet the GNU Makefile.in standard and also some other 
> FSF requirements and it has special rules for generating documentation
> from texinfo files as well as building binary .elc files for emacs 
> list from .el files. While these are all requirements for FSF projects
> there are no rules for generating/converting X specific file types
> and I don't see how automake can be extended for these.
> 
> Therefore automake may not be the optimal tool for building X modules.
> 
> Egbert.
>  
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis@awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.