COPYING / LICENSE file?

[cwebber]

Sorry to be annoying, filing another bug like this on one of your projects. :) Anyway it seems clear to me based on the headers in the .el files that the project as a whole is GPLv2+, but most of the .rkt files have no copyright header... it's a good idea to have such headers, but I think more importantly there should be a toplevel COPYING or LICENSE file that indicates the licesnse, so if some particular file like this is unclear of its licensing that we know what it should be.

Thanks for all your work on racket-mode!

[pmatos]

Interesting, I was looking to license one of my projects and I came to see which license racket-mode was using. Was indeed surprised that there's no LICENSE file.

[sorawee]

If I want to copy/adapt the Racket code inside racket-mode, which license should I use for it?

[greghendershott]

I am a little embarrassed this issue has remained open so long.

I think I pigeon-holed this as "important but not urgent". Also my gut instinct is to move slowly changing anything "legal".

---

I did just prepare a commit a4e9d16 on a topic branch, that adds a LICENSE file as well as SPDX-License-Identifier lines to every .rkt and .el file.

One hesitation before I merge this:

Originally in .el files I had cargo-culted prose from other Emacs source files, that referred to GPL 2. Maybe at that time Emacs was still using GPL 2? I don't recall exactly.

These days Emacs uses GPL 3. And it seems like I should, too... I guess? I'm not really sure.

If this were a commercial endeavor, I'd hire a lawyer to help me understand. Instead I searched and read some discussion and opinions online. GPL 3 seems... fine?

I'd more highly value your opinions -- people commenting on this issue already, or other Racket Mode users. Do you have any? Of course I'd also understand if no one wants to reply because I let this sit for so long.