On Thu, 2020-11-12 at 09:25 +1100, David Bannon wrote: > Are there any further thoughts on this topic ?
It sounds like FreePascal wiki user Graham created parts of the spelling.pas file, is presumably the copyright holder (unless their employer owns it), released it without specifying a license, which means it was "all rights reserved" and then various other people modified and re-released it, in violation of copyright law (since they presumably did not have a license to do so) and eventually it ended up in the tomboy-ng project, also in violation of copyright law. There is the additional wrinkle that hunspell is licensed under the MPL and GPL licenses, presumably the header Graham started with was under the same licenses and what Graham released was clearly a derivative work of the hunspell headers, with the additional work copyright by Graham, so the result would have to comply with one of those licenses, but as far as I can tell, Graham stripped the licenses off and also did not include the "source code", in violation of both of these licenses. I think the solution here would be for you to strip out the code you copied from Graham and other's work and then repeat the h2pas process, bearing in mind the requirements of both the GPL and the MPL, the important ones here are to preserve the license, preserve copyright holder information and to preserve the "source code". What the source code is for this work depends on how you would modify the hunspell Pascal bindings. If (for example when updating to a new hunspell API) you modify the bindings by updating the C headers and then re-running h2pas, then you need to preserve the C headers in your source code alongside spelling.pas but if you would only ever modify the bindings by editing spelling.pas directly, then you can discard the C headers but you still need to use the same licenses in the hunspell bindings. In the latter case it would be a good idea to keep the bindings in a separate file so it can have a separate license header. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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