Unfulfillable licence terms
Hello all,
The program LGrind has a licensing issue which has troubled me a lot. On the
one hand, the source code bears a complete BSD licence (all four
paragraphs). This probably comes from vgrind, an old UNIX tool.
Further down one of the many authors, Van Jacobson, writes the following:
"This program may be freely used and copied but may not be sold
without the author's written permission. This notice must remain
in any copy or derivative."
The typical case of someone accidentally making a program non-free.
Now, the author gives the following means for contacting him:
van@lbl-rtsg.arpa (from arpanet, milnet, csnet, etc.)
..!ucbvax!lbl-csam!van (from Usenet/UUCP)
Well, those addresses don't exist anymore AFAIK. I tried to find the man and
used a more recent email address (van@lbl.gov). Finally I found he moved to
Cisco Systems and tried to use an address there.
No answer. None at all, not even bouncing mail. As far as I'm concerned the
author does not exist anymore. What to do with such a program? Leave it in
non-free forever or rewrite it? Or should I just erase that remark, since I
can be pretty sure he doesn't care?
Really, if someone can point me at how to contact Van Jacobson, he's quite
famous after all, I'd be grateful as well. But what if he is simply
unreachable? Is the licence perhaps somehow void in this case?
Regards,
Mike
--
|=| Michael Piefel piefel@informatik.hu-berlin.de
|=| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin http://www.piefel.de/micha
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