It turns out that recent Automake versions, when called with automake --copy, will install a GPL-3 COPYING file rather than the GPL-2 file to which developers have become accustomed.
I’ve never been particularly happy with Automake’s nasty trickery that makes you have to go out of your way to avoid shipping the GPL-2 with your code. But sneakily upgrading people to GPL-3 is rather devious… So if you’re currently relying upon automake --copy, you may want to give serious consideration to instead just sticking the generated files in your SCM before the GNU people introduce a new clause saying “by shipping this file as part of my project, I agree to give all my worldly possessions to the Church of Richard Stallman”.
