Colin Turner <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi All, > > I hope you can help and advise on this issue. I am packaging a web > application for Debian, I am also the principal upstream author. The > code is generally GPL v2 PHP. Over the years the project inherited, from > a side project, a small fragment of Javascript that has no explicit license. > > The problem I have is that the code is, like so much JS, sitting > available, apparently for general consumption on several websites. I > have been unable to acquire a license from any of the authors (no reply > to emails) and the code is so astonishingly trivial it's hard to see how > it could possibly be re-implemented without it being the same code with > different variable names. > > Any guidance on what I should do? The functionality the code provides > (counting and capping characters in textareas) is quite useful and > losing it would probably cause dataloss in use of the application.
The FSF's guidelines used to specify [1] For the sake of registering the copyright on later versions of the software, you need to keep track of each person who makes significant changes. A change of ten lines or so, or a few such changes, in a large program is not significant. That wording has changed to remove the explicit reference to "ten lines". So in the copyright file, I would mention that this fragment does not have an author and mention FSF's old position. I do not know how the ftp-masters will react, though. Cheers, Walter Landry [email protected] [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2000-10/msg01035.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
