GPL v3 problem list

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

I've updated the wiki at
https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/xemacs/index.php?title=GPLv3,
but there are a couple of booboos I should correct.

First a general comment: Note that without an assignment, it's even
theoretically possible to revoke our license under the GPL, since it's
a gift, not a contract.  So in general what we're looking for is
evidence that a contribution was made by an individual of good will,
so no revocation or insistence on a non-GPLv3-compatible license will
happen.  What that leaves out is people whose views of the world are
unintelligible to us (such as Andrew Choi).  In theory anything owned
by a corporation could go SCO on us (Oracle owns a lot of our code now
that they've acquired Sun), but our contributors generally have a
pretty strong interest in making sure the GPL stands up in court, and
there's nothing we can do about it anyway.

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

 >  > 3. etc/editclient.sh: unknown authorship and license
 > 
 > Probably not useful any more, that predates gnuclient,

Actually, it's an implementation of:

 > ObGoodIdeasThatNeverGetImplemented: when is gnuclient going to be
 > folded into xemacs?

I've sent email to people who might know.  This also applies to a
couple other cases.  Details on the wiki.

 > Emacs 18.58 was probably released in late 1991 -- unless it was
 > released in June 1991 specifically to update the license to GPLv2.  We
 > can check that, tarballs are on the web.

Well, last I looked, GNU mirrors had tarballs back to 18.55, but no
more.:-(  I may have a CD of GNU code from that era somewhere, though.

 >  > 9. etc/tests/external-widget: appears to be O'Reilly code, but
 >  >    the license is unknown.  Is it used anywhere?
 > 
 > That's my code, derived from the O'Reilly book.

Oops, that just ain't true.  In fact, I did write a nearly identical
program to test the external widget, but this stuff goes back to
before I was a contributor!