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Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 11:42:53 -0800
From: Justin Erenkrantz <justin@erenkrantz.com>
To: dev@apr.apache.org
Subject: Licensing of find_apr.m4 and find_apu.m4?
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Something that recently came up on the Subversion list is how to properly 
acknowledge the ASF since it includes APR and APR-util.  Greg, Brian, and 
myself have been educating them on what the AL 2.0 license means and where the 
acknowledgements should go.

However, Greg brought up the case of find_apr.m4 and find_apu.m4 in apr and 
apr-util.  We intended for those to be copied into the source trees but I 
don't think we meant for that to trigger the inclusion of the full NOTICE 
file.  I'd think if a project includes any *other* source file, they should be 
forced to include the full NOTICE and LICENSE files.  And, as well, if they 
(re)distribute APR and APR-util, they'd need to include NOTICE and LICENSE.

So, I'd like to discuss our intent if a project copies those two special files 
into their tree.  My initial thought is to 'public domain' those two files. 
For example, autoconf has exceptions for files it copies into the tree for 
precisely this reason.  configure has:

# This configure script is free software; the Free Software Foundation
# gives unlimited permission to copy, distribute and modify it.

config.{sub|guess} has:

# As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you
# distribute this file as part of a program that contains a
# configuration script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under
# the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.

As a solution, the Creative Commons Public Domain dedication comes to mind 
(<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>.  I'm not sure if that 
goes too far, but perhaps not.

Thoughts?  -- justin