Proposed COPYRIGHT file changes to resolve "PD" issue

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

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After the previous discussions on the list, I spoke with one of
Google's lawyers on the phone. It's taken me a while to follow up
after that because I was away at ELC last week, but I think we have a
good resolution as long as there are no objections.

Where I was coming from was not wanting license crap to be an obstacle
to adoption of musl (after all, that's why I relicensed from LGPL to
MIT in the first place) but also not wanting to scrub my/our belief
that some of these files are non-copyrightable or retroactively claim
ownership of something we can't own.

Where they were coming from was a context of dealing with courts
wrongly (this is my opinion I'm injecting here) deeming interfaces to
be copyrightable, and having to spend ridiculously disproportionate
effort to determine if the license actually gives them permission to
use all the code.

While I don't really agree that they actually have cause for concern
in musl's case, I do agree that the simple fact that the current text
is causing concern means there's something wrong with it. A license
should not make you have to stop and think about whether you can
actually use the software, and certainly shouldn't necessitate 60+
message mailing list threads.

The proposal we reached on the phone call was that I would try
improving the previous patch to no longer make a statement about the
copyrightability of the files in question, but to note that we
expressed such a belief in the past. No new statement that we _do_
hold copyright over these files is made, but the grants of permission
are made unconditionally (i.e. without any conditions like "if these
files are found to be subject to copyright...").

How does this sound? See the attached patch for the specific wording
proposed and let me know if you have constructive ideas for improving
it. On our side, it's really the agreement of the contributors of the
affected code (I have a draft list of them in the patch) that matters,
but I'd welcome input from others too. Also, the patch itself has not
been run by Google's side yet -- I'm doing this all in the open -- so
there still may be further feedback/input from their side.

Rich

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diff --git a/COPYRIGHT b/COPYRIGHT
index 7768600..1c3de21 100644
--- a/COPYRIGHT
+++ b/COPYRIGHT
@@ -115,10 +115,8 @@ licensed under following terms: "Permission to use, copy, modify,
 and/or distribute this code for any purpose with or without fee is
 hereby granted. There is no warranty."
 
-The x86_64 port was written by Nicholas J. Kain. Several files (crt)
-were released into the public domain; others are licensed under the
-standard MIT license terms at the top of this file. See individual
-files for their copyright status.
+The x86_64 port was written by Nicholas J. Kain and is licensed under
+the standard MIT terms.
 
 The mips and microblaze ports were originally written by Richard
 Pennington for use in the ellcc project. The original code was adapted
@@ -140,15 +138,26 @@ can be found in the git version control history of the project. The
 omission of copyright and license comments in each file is in the
 interest of source tree size.
 
-All public header files (include/* and arch/*/bits/*) should be
-treated as Public Domain as they intentionally contain no content
-which can be covered by copyright. Some source modules may fall in
-this category as well. If you believe that a file is so trivial that
-it should be in the Public Domain, please contact the authors and
-request an explicit statement releasing it from copyright.
+In addition, permission is hereby granted for all public header files
+(include/* and arch/*/bits/*) and crt files intended to be linked into
+applications (crt/*, ldso/dlstart.c, and arch/*/crt_arch.h) to omit
+the copyright notice and permission notice otherwise required by the
+license, and to use these files without any requirement of
+attribution. These files include substantial contributions from:
 
-The following files are trivial, believed not to be copyrightable in
-the first place, and hereby explicitly released to the Public Domain:
+[draft, check this list!]
+Bobby Bingham
+Nicholas J. Kain
+Rich Felker
+Richard Pennington
+Stefan Kristiansson
+Szabolcs Nagy
+
+all of whom have explicitly granted such permission.
 
-All public headers: include/*, arch/*/bits/*
-Startup files: crt/*
+This file previously contained text expressing a belief that most of
+the files covered by the above exception were sufficiently trivial not
+to be subject to copyright, resulting in confusion over whether it
+negated the permissions granted in the license. In the spirit of
+permissive licensing, and of not having licensing issues being an
+obstacle to adoption, that text has been removed.