[oe] Question about automake licensing in recipe

[Maupin, Chase]

All,

Just to follow up, the automake team says the current license is GPLv2.  The COPYING file that says GPLv3 is autogenerated.

In regards to future releases they had the following to say:

With both the current license, and any future license, the idea is that
packages using Automake are not bound by the Automake license: the macro
files automake/m4/*.m4 which may be copied into your package's
aclocal.m4 file, have very liberal license headers.  The Makefile.in
files produced by automake receive very liberal license headers as well
(basically all you need to do is retain the license statement).  The
helper scripts automake/lib/* either have very liberal license
statements themselves, or carry a GPL exception, or are considered
independent programs on their own.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org
> [mailto:openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org] On Behalf Of
> Maupin, Chase
> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 8:28 AM
> To: openembedded-devel at lists.openembedded.org
> Subject: Re: [oe] Question about automake licensing in recipe
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org
> > [mailto:openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org] On Behalf Of
> > Phil Blundell
> > Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 7:56 AM
> > To: openembedded-devel at lists.openembedded.org
> > Subject: Re: [oe] Question about automake licensing in recipe
> >
> > On Fri, 2010-09-24 at 21:38 +0930, Graham Gower wrote:
> > > Basically, automake have to contact all their contributors to allow
> > > their GPLv2 code to be distributed under GPLv3. Or they have to pull
> > > the GPLv3 code out.
> >
> > If automake has followed the usual GNU conventions then all the
> > contributors will have assigned copyright of their code to the FSF
> > anyway.  In that case, the FSF can (being the copyright holder)
> > unilaterally decide what licence it should be distributed under.
> 
> As a follow up I'm beginning to wonder if the COPYING file in the lib
> directory wasn't auto-generated by automake itself.  Newer versions of
> automake will apply the "gnu" strictness by default and will create a
> COPYING file for GPLv3.  Either way, I have submitted an e-mail to the
> automake list asking for them to clarify their licensing.
> 
> >
> > If they haven't done that then, yeah, they would probably need the
> > permission of the original authors to change the licensing.
> >
> > p.
> >
> >
> >
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> 
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