CoCoA » CoCoALib

• ensure that all copyright lines are correct (Anna and me)
• remove the GPL blurb from each file
• insert MIT/BSD licence blurb in each file -- which is more appropriate?
• create a new type of release with the revised licence.

Do we give the release just to Gereon? Or should we make it available to all and sundry?
Note that Gereon would be free to further release the code we give him (assuming MIT/BSD permits that).

As mentioned in #855#note-15 the FSF gives advice at the following URL:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html

Their suggestion for a non_GPL licence is Apache Version 2.0. I'll ask Gereon if that would be OK for him.

Gereon also said that he did not need a licence change for the documentation (but we should anyway clarify the licence for the documentation in those files which currently say nothing).

• add copyright notices to all files (incl. Makefile and other supporting files)
• in source code add a restrictive copyright notice which is then replaced by GPL (or whatever we choose) when making a release.

Here is an initial (unsafe) shell script which replaces a single line containing a "keyword" string, by the contents of a file.

#! /bin/bash

FILE=$1
STRING=$2
INSERT_FILE=$3

line=`cat -n "$FILE" | fgrep "$STRING" | head -1 | cut -f 1`
echo "line = $line" 

nextline=`expr $line + 1`
prevline=`expr $line - 1`

head -n $prevline "$FILE" 
cat "$INSERT_FILE" 
tail -n +$nextline "$FILE" 

Not yet sure how to make this script safer (e.g. explicit paths for head and tail; checking for non-zero rtn codes)

Currently our copyright notice in source code files says the following (following guidance from FSF about using GPL):

//   CoCoALib is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
//   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
//   the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
//   (at your option) any later version.

//   CoCoALib is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
//   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
//   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
//   GNU General Public License for more details.

//   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
//   along with CoCoALib.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

I presume the equivalent for Apache-2.0 should says more or less the same mutatis mutandis, especially the part about "without any warranty".

We need to consider also the copyright notices in the sources for CoCoA-5.
Should the copyright notice for CoCoA-5 files be identical to that of CoCoALib files?

We need to decide what the restrictive message should say.
Ideally it should be just 1 or 2 lines long, and placed very uniformly in all files so that the naive script above does not do anything stupid.

This is a private copy for your private use; you may not give it to others.
A public open-source version can be obtained from http://cocoa.dima.unige.it/