Proper license note for Maxima and Maxima-derived works

On 12/6/2012 9:33 AM, Stefano Ferri wrote:
> 2012/12/6 Richard Fateman <fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu 
> <mailto: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?
I think the answer is that you put your contribution into the code base, 
and don't look at the license.

> 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...
Since there appears to be no one enforcing this, at least for Maxima, 
nor for that matter does there
seem to be any way of enforcing it, especially given that the US Dept of 
Energy said it was OK to distributed
under GPL... who knows.  Of course I am not a lawyer.

The export  restrictions say it is illegal to export the software to  
Cuba, North Korea, and maybe some places like Sudan, Syria.