Re: GNU config (config.sub/guess) is now GPLv3 with additional permission
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 06:44:00PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> Upstream has changed the license to GPLv3. It has an additional
> permission to negate any "viral effects", but it only applies to
> packages that include a configuration script generated by GNU
> autoconf.
[...]
> Here is the new license text for config.sub and config.guess:
[...]
> As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you
> distribute this file as part of a program that contains a
> configuration script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under
> the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that
> program. This Exception is an additional permission under section 7
> of the GNU General Public License, version 3 ("GPLv3").
Interesting choice of wording. Read literally ("generated by
Autoconf"), this would mean that the exception only applies when you
distribute config.guess or config.sub as part of a source distribution
that includes the generated configure, not just the input configure.ac.
Which should be the case for most source distributions, but it still
seems interesting.
And on the flip side, you could also trivially satisfy this by including
a generated configure script that doesn't actually get used.
In any case, this seems like something we could easily scan for with
lintian or with any of the automatic whole-archive source scanning
tools: just look for a source package that contains config.sub or
config.guess but does *not* contain a configure script (or whose
configure script does not contain "Generated by GNU Autoconf" in its
first few lines).
- Josh Triplett
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