[Sorry for the personal CC, but it seems appropriate to mail the copyright holder on licensing issues.] [Followups should probably go to -legal.] On Sat, Jul 29, 2000 at 06:11:53PM -0400, Decklin Foster wrote: > [I am the upstream author for this one] > License is X-style: > > Copyright (c) 1998-2000 Decklin Foster. All rights reserved. > > THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR "AS IS", WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS > OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE > HELD LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES CONNECTED WITH THE USE OF THIS PROGRAM. > > This program is free software. You are granted permission, free of > charge, to copy this program, modify it, and distribute/publish/sell > copies of it, as long as this license is not modified or removed from > the copyright notice. You may also use parts of this program's code in > your own software, if you agree to distribute it under this license. I think you should probably clarify the antecedent of "it" in the final sentence of your license. Does "it" refer to "parts of this program's code", or "your own software". If the latter, then you have made a "viral" MIT/X style license. Actually, I am not sure the final sentence is necessary at all. If you'd like to use an X-style license, may I suggest the following? *** Copyright 1998-2000 Decklin Foster. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL DECKLIN FOSTER BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. Except as contained in this notice, the name of Decklin Foster shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from Decklin Foster. *** You can omit the final paragraph if you want; with or without it, it will not impact the GPL-compatibility of this license (the old BSD clause that *compels* mention of the copyright holder *is* GPL-incompatible, on the other hand). As I understand it, neither the "(C)" indicator nor "All Rights Reserved" are necessary, nor have they been for many years. They are holdovers from, IIRC, before the U.S. Copyright Act of 1981. Nowadays, you hold copyright in your work by default, and need not include any special glyph "©" or an attempt at an equivalent sequence "(C)". "All Rights Reserved" is also the default state of any copyright materials. A "license" is a limited waiver of your rights to the copyrighted work, under the terms of that license. (You can't sue someone for violation of your copyright for doing what you granted them license to do.) -- G. Branden Robinson | Communism is just one step on the long Debian GNU/Linux | road from capitalism to capitalism. branden@debian.org | -- Russian saying http://www.debian.org/~branden/ |
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