Re: what happened to COPYING.newlib in the tarball?

["J. Johnston" <jjohnstn at cygnus dot com>]

"Bryan K. Ogawa" wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> First, much thanks.  I just got, and built, a set of cross compilers using
> gcc + newlib, and newlib 1.9.0 worked first time on both platforms (sh and
> arm).
> 
> However, I had a few license-related questions.
> 
> 1.  I know that the newlib ftp servers include the COPYING.NEWLIB file,
> but the actual newlib tarball (at least, the 1.9.0 one), no longer
> includes this, only including the GPL and LGPL .  However, newlib/README
> still refers to COPYING.NEWLIB, and the ChangeLog indicates that it was
> updated as recently as last July.  So, is COPYING.NEWLIB still the license
> for newlib itself?
> 

Yes it is.  Our previous tarballs were made by taking a snapshot of the internal CVS
development sources and then tarring up the results.  When sourceware.cygnus.com started up, a new
CVS repository was created.  Unfortunately, newlib was not originally part of the sourceware
repository and it was not originally placed in the repository.  When newlib was eventually added,
the fact that it was missing was not noticed.  The file had already been added to the repository but
I have just appended the file to the 1.9.0 snapshot.

> 2.  What, precisely, is the intent of the GPL/LGPL licenses in the newlib
> tarball?  I assumed that this is merely to cover the toolchain (e.g. the
> autoconf stuff) since seems to have come from GCC, but I wasn't sure.
>

The files in the top level directory are shared by a number of projects including some that
are LGPL and GPL.
 
> 3.  A number of places reference the file "copying.dj" for code that DJ
> Delorie wrote, and indicate that
> 
>         This file may not be distributed without a verbatim copy of
>         "copying.dj".
> 
> Now, since I've seen Mr. Delorie posting quite recently to the list, I
> wouldn't think he objects terribly strongly to the file not being in the
> distribution, but since the terms from the file (presumably) still do
> apply, having a copy in the newlib tarball might be appropriate, or in
> COPYING.NEWLIB, or possibly replacing all of those statements with some
> other boilerplate.
>

The file is in the distribution which satisfies the terms in COPYING.NEWLIB.  It is found in
newlib/libc/sys/go32. 

-- Jeff J.