Phew, this is a hard one, since (AIUI) it's actually very difficult to abandon one's IP rights and put it in something called "the public domain". A conservative read of the below is that the only thing the notice does is act as a disclaimer; it doesn't expressly allow one to modify or redistribute, rights that would need to be granted in order for the work to be incorporated into an ASF-licensed work. On the other hand, doesn't the word "public domain" imply that all rights associated with copyright have been granted? Anyone know the case law around this?
If there's any way to contact MathWords or the people at math.nist.gov and ask them to put an MIT or BSD license on the code (which should accomplish exactly what they intend) that would be a much more solid approach. As it sits today, the question is probably "are we satisfied that neither NIST nor MathWorks would ever sue us or our licensees for copyright violation" - a value judgement I'd guess the board would need to make, based on feedback here.
Brian
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Phil Steitz wrote:
The Jakarta Commons Math project would like to incorporate some code from the JAMA matrix package <http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics/jama>. The web page includes the following copyright statement:
------------------------------------------------------
Copyright Notice This software is a cooperative product of The MathWorks and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which has been released to the public domain. Neither The MathWorks nor NIST assumes any responsibility whatsoever for its use by other parties, and makes no guarantees, expressed or implied, about its quality, reliability, or any other characteristic.
---------------------------------------------------
The sources include no copyright notices or @author tags. Is there any reason that we cannot incorporate code from these sources into Commons Math?
Thanks!
Phil
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
