On Sat, 09 Mar 2013 01:19:31 -0500 John Kasunich <jmkasun...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> If at any point a chunk of code was public domain, it seems to > me that the authors as of that point in time gave up all rights > to it, including the right to object to re-licensing. I would say > we only need to contact those people who contributed after > the license was changed to GPL. I agree, with one caveat: The PD authors have an interest in their work remaining available in the Public Domain. Now, it's not really our responsibility to make this happen, but in the process of figuring out who needs to be contacted, we'll have to determine that exact point in time where the license changed from PD to GPLv2only. Once that is figured out, it will easy to pack up an archive file and declare that file as the "One True Last Public Domain Version". Here is an e-mail from Fred Proctor: ****************************************************************** From: Fred Proctor To: Multiple recipients of list <e...@nist.gov> Subject: EMC software copyright, etc. Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 15:58:47 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: e...@nist.gov Sender: e...@nist.gov X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (WinNT; I) EMC folks, The EMC software was written by us U.S. government employees, and is not subject to copyright. It's public domain. If we tried to keep it out of your hands we couldn't, because of the Freedom of Information Act. You can do anything you want with it, like give it away, sell it, whatever. You can't copyright it yourself. You can put an EMC on a machine tool and resell it, as some of you have done. This is great. You can make an easy-install CD and sell this for big bucks, no problem. We wrote this to support our work testing plug-and-play standards for machine tools and robots. There's no warrantee, support, or anything like that. The e...@nist.gov mailing list is the support, and it's working great. --Fred ****************************************************************** At some point, Fred added the "GPLv2 and other rights" phrase to some or all of the files (I'll go back and research this fully). He told me (on the phone I guess, I can't find an e-mail) that "other rights" meant "also it's Public Domain". I think that the point when someone went in and removed the "and other rights" text would be the point where the GPLv2 license became valid. I base this opinion on the idea that anyone making contributions to the code, who valued them enough to consider their copyrights, would have a duty to fully understand the copyright notice at the top of the file. Such a person can reasonably be expected to have ascertained the meaning of "and other rights" before committing valuable work. Once this text was removed, contributors could reasonably be expected to have committed their work under the remaining (GPLv2) license terms. Maybe tomorrow (Sunday) I can look into this stuff some more. Also, my opinions are of no exceptional value, so if you have an opinion, now is the time to express it. Thanks, Matt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 positioned as A LEADER in The Forrester Wave(TM): Endpoint Security, Q1 2013 and "remains a good choice" in the endpoint security space. For insight on selecting the right partner to tackle endpoint security challenges, access the full report. http://p.sf.net/sfu/symantec-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
