License issue with SRFI 29
Philip McGrath 22 Oct 2021 16:18 UTC
According to [1], SRFI 29 should have been converted in the great
relicensing of 2005 to use the MIT license. However, the official SRFI
29 document [2] (more specifically, at [3]) still gives the old SRFI
license.
The old license places some troublesome restrictions on modification,
which means that distributions like Debian and Fedora can't distribute
the SRFI 29 document under their license policies: for example, they
apply patches to remove it from Racket's offline documentation (see
discussion at [4] and subsequent issues). Obviously, we'd all prefer to
be able to distribute the document under the familiar and unambiguously
acceptable MIT license.
Can we get confirmation that, as [1] implies, SRFI 29 specifically is
licensed under the MIT license?
Even better, could the official document be updated to reflect the MIT
license, as has been done e.g. with SRFI 28 [5]?
(I've copied srfi-discuss and srfi-editors here, since the srfi-29 list
hasn't been used since 2007: apologies to anyone who receives this
message more than once.)
-Philip
[1]: https://srfi-email.schemers.org/srfi-announce/msg/2652023/
[2]: https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-29/srfi-29.html
[3]:
https://github.com/scheme-requests-for-implementation/srfi-29/blob/c6f90e0345ffc277917d22478228c5d549a99d74/srfi-29.html#L476-L501
[4]: https://github.com/racket/srfi/issues/4
[5]: https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-28/srfi-28.html