Re: Expand LICENSES file

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

Certainly the reason the file exists is to meet the requirements of any
copyright terms saying some particular text must be included somewhere.
But it's also perfectly appropriate for it to include all other non-GNU
license terms for anything in our sources.  Without having checked myself
that your cuts and pastes were all correct or anything, I certainly think
the change is fine.

Note also that manual/contrib.texi endeavors to mention all instances of
other copyright owners.  As well as auditing that for omissions (or stale
references to code we no longer have) as you're doing for LICENSES, someone
should probably double-check that we're meeting the letter and spirit of
all the requirements by having their actual text only in a file in the
source tree rather than also being in the manual itself where we can
reasonably say that users are expected to see it.  System distributors
probably also need to (and probably already do) include LICENSES somewhere
in binary-only packages that do not include the manual.

This might be a good project for someone new who is unsure how best to
contribute technically.  It's tedious but very important to the project,
and a fine reason to skim through the entire source tree and learn a few
things about what is what and where it is.


Thanks,
Roland