[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Karl Berry) writes: > (Not sure that we still want to refer to the COPYING* files.)
I suggest using a URL instead; that's what several packages do now, and nowadays it is more convenient than a file and will explain the abbreviation well. "sort --version" could output something like this, say: sort (GNU coreutils) 6.2 Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License: GPL v2 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. If the version number is important, gnu.org should publish stable URLs for each version of each license. Currently it doesn't, at least not for the GPL: I couldn't find the GPLv1 there, for example. I don't know where the "MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." came from in the snipped you quoted. The wording above is used by coreutils: it's briefer and I think it should be just as good legally, though I'm no lawyer. > What do people think of such a thing as a GNU standard? I see that > --version output varies widely now ... > > To pursue this, I guess a next step would be to look at the list of free > software licenses and come up with some abbreviations for the ones most > widely used. Anyone care to look into that? The important thing is the URLs, not the abbreviations. For that, <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> is a good list. But if you want to standardize abbreviations of licenses on that list, here are some suggestions for abbreviations of free licenses mentioned there: GPL LGPL GPL+Guile GPL+Ada X11 Expat SMLNJ public domain [no URL is needed for this one] CeCILL Cryptix GL Modified BSD Zlib iMatrix SFL W3C Berkeley DB OpenLDAP Python Perl Artistic Zope PL Intel Open Source NPL+GPL eCos Eiffel Forum Vim Boost EU DataGrid Software Ruby XFree86 Affero GPL Condor PL Original BSD OpenSSL Academic FL Open Software Apache Apache Software Zope xinetd IBM PL Common PL Eclipse Phorum LaTeX Project MPL CDDL NOSL Interbase PL Sun PL Nokia Open Source NPL Jabber Open Source SISSL QPL PHP Zend Plan 9 Apple Public Source
