Ok, I should verify before writing anything. The license already is LGPL, more precicely "GNU Library General Public License".
Note that there's a difference between the plain LGPL and the "modified LPGL" that is used in other components. See your lazarus dir, COPYING.modifiedLGPL.txt.
IMO, the modified LGPL works better as it spells out that you can create commercial works using the components.
The whole header is copied below. I have earlier moved the Copyright text below license header and added the Abstract description.
Does anybody see a problem there?
Moving stuff does not seem to be a problem. As mentioned above, if Howard agreed, I'd change the license to modified LGPL. Sample from fpvectorial.pas:
fpvectorial.pas
Vector graphics document
License: The same modified LGPL as the Free Pascal RTL
See the file COPYING.modifiedLGPL for more details
edit... though we're in Lazarus here, so something like this would be better (from components/lazcontrols/dividerbevel.pas):
Copyright (C) 2010 Lazarus team
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as the Lazarus Component Library (LCL)
See the file COPYING.modifiedLGPL.txt, included in this distribution,
for details about the copyright.
One thing though. "Copyright (C) 2013 H. Page-Clark" could be changed to "Author: H. Page-Clark" for consistency reasons as other LCL and IDE files as marked that way. I don't know what the law says. Is the author automatically the copyright holder, or is it automatically the "Lazarus team" which distributes the files? Anyway it is not important because of the license terms.
Copyright is automatically assigned to the author per the Berne copyright convention (IIRC most countries signed this, including US and European countries).
So in that sense it doesn't matter. IIRC, US law used to have some convention that you had to indicate you add copyright, but (once again IIRC) no fixed format for that. Regardless, the "Copyright (C) bla" convention began.
Edit: looking at Howard's post: he is happy with assigning the copyright to the "Lazarus team".... which is of course a bit of an amorphous group, but yes, it would broaden the openness as other members of the team (or the team itself, don't know, I'm - fortunately - not an IP lawyer) could relicense the code if they wanted. In that situation, Howard could still reissue his own code under whatever license he thinks fit.
In practice, I doubt it would matter much.
Thanks for looking into these pesky license issues for us.