GPL compliance - Githubissues

tkphd commented 7 years ago

Our implementation does not satisfy the best practices for using GPL.

[ ] LICENSE.md should include the full text GPLv3.
[ ] Every file in the distribution should include the license summary.
[ ] main() should print the license summary, as part of --help if nowhere else.

lucentdan commented 6 years ago

@tkphd

After reading: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

Based on the structure of our project, it looks like we should have a file called "COPYING" that contains the text of the GPLv3 and a file called LICENSE that contains the copyright statement and the license notice. Do you agree that this will address your first checkbox above? If so I can do a pull request for the top level files to get this started.

Thoughts?

tkphd commented 6 years ago

@lucentdan,

The name of the file containing the full text of GPLv3 carries no weight in a legal framework. We are free to use any POSIX-compliant sequence of characters we choose. Since this project is hosted on GitHub, and the filename LICENSE.md is the de facto standard on the platform for copying/redistribution/terms/conditions, I prefer sticking with it for now. The benefit (as you stated offline) of an md-suffixed name is that GitHub renders the file using Markdown, which makes structuring the legalese a bit easier on the eyes than the old ASCII format.

Push-back is, of course, welcome.

mesoscale / mmsp

GPL compliance #28