But what about the .info files? Should we declare them to be part of fink,
and therefore under the GPL? Can we do this retroactively, even though
we didn't make it clear to contributers in the past?
I've always considered it a given that they were GPL'ed, so you have my permission to consider all of my info-files GPL'ed.
I think to be clear, we should:
- Announce on fink-devel that from now on, all new packages checked into CVS are implicitly considered to be copyright the maintainer, licensed under the GPL. Or we could have developers assign copyright to Fink if that's what we want.
- Put a note in the root of dists/ to that effect, so we can actually ensure that any developer should have seen that and is therefore agreeing to it when they commit something.
- Put a note on the website too, in the Packaging guide.
- Get the agreement of as many existing Fink devels as possible that their .info files are GPL'ed.
To be very safe, it might be best to add a required field to the .info spec. Maybe InfoGPL or something. Fink can ignore it, but it will just let us know whether we're sure about each file. We can auto-add "InfoGPL: no" to every file, and then as we get the agreement from developers change it to yes (or maybe something more binding like "InfoGPL: This file is licensed under the GPL").
I'm not sure even this is enough, since there are some files that have been modified by many, many developers, and so "ownership" isn't exactly easy to establish. This speaks in favour of assigning copyright to Fink rather than the maintainer I guess.
Dave
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