On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 12:07:28AM -0500, Sean Finney said > hi -devel, cc'ing to -legal, m-f-t set appropriately. > i have a question about the licensing: > > On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 09:46:52PM -0500, Sean Finney wrote: > > * License : (GPL + Required Copyright Disclaimer) > > the original source code was distributed with the following disclaimer: > > /************************************************************************ > * Copyright 1995-1999 by DFN-CERT. All rights reserved. > * > * This material was originally written and compiled by Wolfgang Ley and > * Uwe Ellermann at the DFN-CERT, Germany, in 1995-96 > * > * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted > * provided that this entire copyright notice is duplicated in all such > * copies. This doesn't provide permission to distribute modified versions, and so doesn't comply with the DFSG. > however, it's also built against the gnu regexp library, which is GPL'd. > am i right in assuming that the software is then implicitly under > the GPL? No, the above license is also incompatible with the GPL (since you don't have the right to distribute modified versions), which means you can't distribute it at all (even in non-free). > i've spoken with the upstream, and he has no obligations to > his modifications being distributed under the same terms, whatever they > may be. You'll need to get them to grant permission to distribute modified copies; re-licensing it under the 3-clause BSD or MIT/X licenses (which are both DFSG-free and GPL-compatible) would work, and sound like they do what upstream wants, anyway. Note this line: * Copyright 1995-1999 by DFN-CERT. All rights reserved. "DFN-CERT" has to re-license the software, Wolfgang Ley and Uwe Ellermann do not hold the copyright and thus cannot re-license it. -- Rob Weir <rweir@ertius.org> | mlspam@ertius.org | Do I look like I want a CC? Words of the day: emc Belknap NATO India RSA espionage Crypto AG hackers Merlin
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