Concerns regarding license of various homalg packages

[fingolfin]

Not sure if this is the best place to file this, but I didn't want to open identical issues on a ton of repositories... I think most (all) of the packages I am talking about are not shipped with GAP, so this is very non-urgent for me. And perhaps irrelevant because you never intend to ship any of those. But if you ever want to submit them for distribution with GAP, ideally the issues should be addressed before.

Also, I am guessing your PackageJanitor is already checking for License fields and files, so perhaps all of this is already covered -- if so, just close the issue!

1. For many (most?) homalg packages outside this repository, there is no License field in the PackageInfo.g file. It would be great if those could be added. The following packages are affected:

$ rg --files-without-match License */PackageInfo.g | cut -f1 -d/ | sort -f
AbelianSystems
alcove
alexander
AlgebraicThomas
Bicomplexes
Blocks
CombinatoricsForHomalg
Conley
D-Modules
FiniteTopologies
InfiniteLists
k-Points
KaroubiEnvelope
LetterPlace
MapleForHomalg
ModelCategories
Orbifolds
OscarForHomalg
QPA2
SCSCP_ForHomalg
SimplicialObjects
SingularForHomalg
SystemTheory
VirtualCAS

2. In fact many of those also have no LICENSE/COPYING/whatsoever file, so perhaps that could be added as well.

3. I also noticed that at least some of them list only GPL2 as license, not "GPL2 or later". E.g. in AbelianSystems the only reference I could find to a license is in the title page of the manual, which says:

    This package may be distributed under the terms and conditions of the
    GNU Public License Version 2.

[zickgraf]

Background information from my side: PackageJanitor adds License := "GPL-2.0-or-later" to PackageInfo.g and adds a corresponding LICENSE file. The packages listed above are not (yet?) tracked by PackageJanitor. And PackageJanitor cannot detect if another license is listed in the manual.

[fingolfin]

I think there is no way to avoid that someone looks over the manuals of each of these packages (or at least runs a simple grep for terms like "license" on them) to verify they make no contradictory license claims. Assuming this passes, adding a LICENSE file and that License field, all with GPL 2, should be easy, even w/o PackageJanitor. Though of course it'd be great if it was used for all these packages. What exactly is holding that back? A lack of someone who performs the necessary work?

[mohamed-barakat]

Most of these packages are neither in active development nor use, so they are not handled by PackageJanitor yet. Once I touch any of them, I will add them to PackageJanitor.