Proper license note for Maxima and Maxima-derived works

2012/12/6 Richard Fateman <fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu>

>
> Some of the files that say "contain enhancements"  may actually be
> unchanged from the original
> version as released by the Department of Energy, except for the copyright
> notice (etc) .
>
> I personally dislike the presentation of programs/files in which the
> valuable first
> documentation section gives almost no useful information (like what the
> file
> contains!), but instead makes you scroll through some boilerplate GPL
> announcement
> to get to the data.
>
> For your own contribution you could say something like "copyright XXX.
> Permission to use or redistribute
> granted."  But that's just my opinion.
>
> RJF
>


Actually it's not a problem of copyright for my contribution, which is
almost nonexistent. I don't claim any copyright, my problem can be
reformulated like this: how can I redistribute, in a GPL v3 software, a
small part of a piece of code of which I don't know exactly the licensing
conditions? Is merror.lisp distributed under the GPL v2, GPLv2 or later,
etc? In particular I am in doubt reading the paragraph about the U.S.
Export Administration Regulations in the file with the GPL text... seems
like it has always to be included in any source file...
I only need to redistribute a modified version of the function merror, and
probably no one will care if I put there a generic (or even wrong)
copyright notice, but I would like to do things in the correct way.

Stefano