On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 02:38:26PM -0600, Barak Pearlmutter wrote:
>
> (emphasis mine, of course) you'll notice it refers to the "program".
> So these do not imply that "snippets" in the tarball are under the
> GPL, because they aren't in fact part of the program. In other words,
> it is not a contradiction to put my canonical
> README.sister.cancer.molbio in the tarball with a biosequence
> alignment program which is GPLed with all the usual boilerplate,
> because the boilerplate only applies to the program itself (broadly
> construed of course) and not a snippet like README.sister.molbio.
If the general license text doesn't apply, and the file does not explicitly
state another license, then it falls under the default rules - which is to
say, 'All Rights Reserved', and we *cannot* distributed it legally.
Sorry, but at least this time, you can't have your cake and eat it too;
either it falls under the general license (in which case it is almost
certainly modifiable, since the general license is probably a free software
license that allows modification and redistribution), it's under an
explicit, separate license (which we can review on it's own merits), or it
isn't under a license at all, in which case we have no useful rights.
If you can think of an explicit fourth case, do bring it up, but I believe
those three constitute sets whose intersection is the null set, and whose
union is (equivalent to?) the universal set.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU NetBSD/i386 porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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