Nathanael Nerode wrote: > Files in the /etc directory of emacs21 which may be legally problematic follow. > > * There are a lot of files without any copyright or licensing information, > and upstream probably will want to fix this. I would remove a lot of these > even if they turn out to be free, as much of it is useless cruft. Upstream will almost certainly *not* want to fix this, as much as we might want them to. I don't think duplicating gnu.org/philosophy in the emacs source tarball is a particularly good idea, but the emacs authors (or at least those with a say in the matter) seem to. > ObLicense: I hereby give permission to forward this message or any part of it > (verbatim) to anyone who you think might find it useful. Heh. > Second, files with explicit license notices which aren't standard > free licenses, apart from the non-free files you already identified [...] > COPYING > -- Non-free (verbatim only), but we make an exception for it because it's > the license for the program. Even if not a freeness issue, it should be removed in favor of /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL. [...] > Finally, files with no explicit license notice. > > These are either free or non-distributable. > > The upstream emacs maintainers might want this list. GNU policy is generally > to put a copyright and license notice in every file, and I suspect the absence > from some of these files (like README and Makefile) is simply an oversight, > and that these files are in fact FSF copyright. Frankly this directory could > do with a good spring cleaning: anonymous cookie recipes are really not > necessary, and 8-year-old order forms are ridiculous. That line of reasoning seems quite reasonable; at a minimum, perhaps they'd at least change it from legally ambigious to verbatim copying only, which would at least clarify the situation. [...] > LPF > -- does the organization even exist anymore? The most recent news item on http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/ dates from 2005-10-22, so they seem to still exist, if not with a great deal of activity. ISTR seeing this on gnu.org somewhere with a verbatim only license attached, but I could be wrong, and google doesn't seem to see it at the moment. > Makefile I don't have this in my copy. > celibacy.1 > condom.1 > -- Post-1988 (1992). Probably a better fit for the funny-manpages package than the emacs package. > echo.msg > -- Released 1985 in US without copyright notice, so public domain. Potentially modified since then; the CVS logs for emacs only go back to "Sun Oct 3 12:34:45 1999", and that still leaves 14 years for potentially copyrightable modifications. In any case, more suited for the funny-manpages package than the emacs package. > sex.6 > -- Issued without copyright notice prior to 1988 (1987), > so it's in the public domain. Modified since then, according to emacs CVS. In any case, more suited for the funny-manpages package than the emacs package. > spook.lines > -- unlikely to be copyrightable, so I would assume it is public > domain Word lists can be copyrightable if the selection of the words involved actual creativity rather than an exhaustive list; that list certainly seems to qualify. - Josh Triplett
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