Figure out a strategy for licensing considerations

[ehuss]

Support for licensing was previously owned by the core team. I think the Council should consider what strategy they want to take for supporting licensing questions and considerations for the Project as a whole. Should the Council be responsible? Should a team be created to delegate that responsibility? Can the Foundation provide support somehow?

Some examples of questions or considerations:

• When new licenses are added to the Rust distribution, how do we make decisions on those?
  • Some recent examples are questions about including libgcc GPL code (https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/386786-rustc-codegen-gcc/topic/Add.20script.20to.20build.20libgccjit.20easily.3F, https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/231349-t-core.2Flicensing/topic/cg_gcc.20vendoring)
• Do we need a better copyright/license collection? (See Rust code copyright situation is unclear rust#63232, Rewrite the COPYRIGHT file rust#39897)
  • Last year, REUSE support was added, but I am not clear where things go from there.
• Are there problems with the existing license exceptions that we have?
• Who is assigned copyright?
• Possible violations (like GPL currently in rustup)?
• Supporting issues like the apfloat rewrite.
• Confusion over the "above copyright notice" that doesn't exist: rust-lang/rust@2a8807e#commitcomment-28375512
• Rename (or otherwise replace) the t-core/license Zulip channel.
• See also Clarify the Rust compiler's licensing status core-team#8
• See also (Apache-2.0 OR MIT) explanation page rust-forge#241
• Support rust-lang projects that need to answer questions of how to handle licensing details. Example: License headers in files generated by mdbook init --theme mdBook#2220
• What is the license and requirements of the standard library? (Licensing: It's unclear exactly what license text must be included in a Rust binary. rust#67014)

What other questions or considerations are there?

[crlf0710]

Also, finishing up rust-lang/rust#43461 .