For the purpose of giving (on the phone) a micro tutorial on GNU make, I am considering writing two hello world programs in C.
The first one fits in a single file helloworld1.c
The second illustrates compilations in two translation units, so have hello2.c
and world2.c
and both include helloworld2.h
They are under github at https://github.com/bstarynk/misc-basile/tree/master/HelloWorld (this is self-contained; I am using GPLv3+ in commit da5b940fb4b7cab7b631de, but could change the license if something else is more appropriate)
Can I GPLv3+ license these files (and their Makefile
) ??
I feel that such an example is too trivial to be GPLv3+ licensed. It falls into the "obvious code" category, and hello-world was first used 40 years ago as a canonical example of C.
BTW, GNU hello is too complex. It also teaches autoconf, which is out of scope for me.
The juridiction I am under is the French one (I am a French citizen, near Paris, and this is a tiny part of my research engineer work at CEA, a French state owned organization, similar to US DoE). The project funding my work is an European Commission funded one (so under European Union legislation, IIUC)
PS. Per that MadHatter's answer: I want to GPL that code to send the right signals to people who use it, to show that I am happy to have it reused by people who themselves go on to share. Also, this might be funded (but hopefully not explicitly, it is too small work) by some H2020 project (funding my work on bismon) where contractually all the software I am writing is GPLv3+ licensed. Neither me nor my employer (CEA) is interested in legal trolls or sueing others about these hello-world programs.
PPS. Of course I am not a lawyer.