Subject: Re: [bug#57055] [PATCH 2/2] gnu: Add guile-srfi-146.

From: Maxime Devos <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2022 22:34:50 +0200

On 19-08-2022 15:41, pukkamustard wrote:

> I'm no legal expert, but I think I am free to distribute it only
> under LGPL-3.0-or-later (and not also ISC). And I prefer to do so.
Sure, go ahead and distribute it as LGPL-3.0-or-later, but I don't see 
how it follows that license:isc should be removed from the license list.

However, to me it seems inaccurate that you do not have to follow the 
ISC by following the LGPL-3.0-or-later instead. The ISC has a line:
> ;; [...] The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall 
> be included
> ;; in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. [...]
Even if ISC permits relicensing, I would assume you will still have to 
follow that. Otherwise, you could circumvent 'preserve this copyright 
notice / preserve authorship information / ...’ requirements by 
relicensing it as something very permissive, which seems a loophole to me.
> For prior cases see modules/srfi/srfi-71.scm as distributed with
> Guile. The file contains a SRFI sample implementation with the same ISC
> license header. It seems to be fine to relicense modules distributed
> with Guile as LGPL-3.0-or-later.

I am not following, how is this relicensing?

> In the Guix package definition for Guile only license:lgpl3+ is listed (and not license:isc).

Right, I would add license:isc with an appropriate comment to the list 
in the Guile package definition, looks like the license information for 
that package is incomplete.

[...]

More generally, I don't see a need for computing an 'effective license' 
(*) of the licenses of the individual files, given the lack of legal 
experts here and as 'licenses' accepts a list, not only a single item.

(*) things like 'isc or expat + lgplN-or-later -> lgplN-or-later'.

Greetings,
Maxime.