Is referencing the GPL in the package's README enough of a "license"?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Mar  9, 2007, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 05:27 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> On Mar  7, 2007, Peter Gordon <peter at thecodergeek.com> wrote:
>> 
>> > However, it contains no full license text, and the headers in the
>> > source files only contain author/version informations. The only
>> > reference to a license aside from what's on the website is that the
>> > README file (which I include as %doc) contains the following line:
>> 
>> > 	License: GPL
>> 
>> > Is this reference enough,
>> 
>> IANAL.  It's enough for you to tell that you can use any version of
>> the GPL, but it's not enough for you to be allowed to distribute the
>> program without a copy of the GPL, because the GPL itself requires it
>> to be included.

> IANAL, IMO, this is an upstream-issue, because it's legally
> irrelevant/legally not bind to _upstream_ whether a packager adds a copy
> of the GPL or not.

IANAL, but AFAIK the terms established by the GPL for licensees don't
apply to a sole copyright holder.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}