[Rd] readline operate-and-get-next

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> [2010-08-12 18:25]:

> Hmm, one of those 'minimal changes' was to omit the copyright and
> licence statements.  I very much doubt that you have the right to post
> copied code without those, and we certainly do not have the right to
> use such code in the R sources.

I am sorry for this omission.

> Bash is currently distributed under a licence that FSF deems
> incompatible with that of R, and we would only accept code which can
> be (re-)licensed under GPL (>=2).  So it is critical where exactly
> you copied this from.
> 
> We can only consider code contributions where the provenance and
> licensing of the code is clearcut.

The code was taken from file bashline.c distributed in the bash-3.0
sources (available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-3.0.tar.gz).
The header of this file is:

/* bashline.c -- Bash's interface to the readline library. */

/* Copyright (C) 1987-2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

   This file is part of GNU Bash, the Bourne Again SHell.

   Bash is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
   under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
   any later version.

   Bash is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
   ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
   or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public
   License for more details.

   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
   along with Bash; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to the Free
   Software Foundation, 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111 USA. */

Would that be okay?

> That includes your own contributions, and since you posted from an
> address which is likely to be your employer, who owns the copyright of
> your work needs to be clear too.

Well, in the proposed patch there was no line of code that could 
genuinely be called "mine".  I think that my contribution would fall
below the "legally significant" threshold, as defined by the GNU project:

http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant

I would classify my changes as mere "ideas", as discussed in the URL
above (besides the fact that the code does actually work).  In this case,
I do not think we should bother making me hold copyright on the sys-std.c
file.

> If you provide a patch with these extremely important issues
> resolved, we will consider its merits.  But not otherwise.

Please, tell me whether what I wrote above is okay and I will prepare a
new patch containing the copyright clarification.

Best regards,

Rafael Laboissiere