Put all copyrights & licenses in one place

[sjamaan]

To make it easier for people making binary-only distributions we should repeat the copyright statement somewhere in the docs (or perhaps aggregate all the copyright statements of 3rd party software in one place. Perhaps Chicken's LICENSE file)

I think the LICENSE file is best for that. Aggregate all 3-clause BSD licences by adding copyright lines. For all other licenses (including 2-clause BSD licenses and the SRFI licenses), just add new blocks of license declarations to that file. I think that would be the most manageable way to keep this straight.

I'll post a prepared LICENSE file later.

[sjamaan]

I tried to be as complete as possible in listing all I found, but I only grepped through the sources, so might have missed some.

The syntax is a little bit wiki-like (and would probably parse as valid wiki code), so we can put it in the manual if necessary.

[sjamaan]

Felix: Please reset my copyright in apply-hack.sparc64.S to the Chicken Team. I don't want to be listed separately for something so silly and small :)

[Jim Ursetto]

Why is Chicken copyright (c) 1996 by Olin Shivers?

[sjamaan]

He holds copyright on the implementation of let-optionals in Chicken (chicken-syntax.scm), without which Chicken would not be complete.

I originally debated whether to separate the actual "main" main copyright from the "additional parts". Eventually I decided to group all the copyrights under the 3-clause BSD license together, to make it more concise. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

I'll leave it to Felix to decide the final partitioning of the license file.

[sjamaan]

OK, new version.

I aggregated all of Olin's copyright lines together (I had missed the fact that he had both a line for 1996 and one for 1998, 1999, 2000).

I'm not 100% sure you're allowed to do that since the license says the code must "retain the above copyright line", but this is certainly in accordance with the spirit of the license and makes it shorter and clearer.

[felix winkelmann]

I have updated the license text (experimental branch) and made some minor changes, including stating the complete license text for each subsystem written by others. Note that I removed "others" from the main license body.

[sjamaan]

Almost correct. Olin's copyright for let-optionals is only 1996.

The "1998, 1999, 2000" refers to Olin's Scsh copyright (which is 3-clause BSD) on srfi-13. This entire license is missing from the srfi-13 text in LICENSE. (the Scsh license doesn't seem to apply on srfi-14.scm, though!)

Here's a diff against your LICENSE to clarify what I mean.

[sjamaan]

Add Olin's Scsh copyrights to srfi-13.scm and fix his copyrights on let-optionals

[felix winkelmann]

Milestone 4.6.0 deleted