Re: chroot administration

[Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 17:38, John Hasler wrote:
> Shaya Potter writes:
> > At least when I worked at NRL, I thought it created this murky situation
> > of "public domain" for us citizens (or in US not sure which) but not for
> > anyone else.
>
> In the US works of the US government are "public domain" for everyone.
> However, it might be able to obtain and enforce copyrights in the
> jurisdictions of other governments.

I don't think that it is possible for them to get a copyright in another 
jurisdiction without getting one in their own.  As the US government is 
prohibited from owning copyright they definately can't get a copyright in 
their own jurisdiction, and possibly can't apply for one in another 
jurisdiction (depending on interpretation).

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 17:02, John Hasler wrote:
> Russell Coker writes:
> > If software can't be freely used for any purpose then it can't be
> > released under the GPL.  The NSA assert that they have the right to
> > release under the GPL and that therefore the patent issues have been
> > dealt with.
>
> Was the work done by NSA employees?  If so it can be treated as if it were
> in the public domain no matter what license NSA attaches to it (that's NSAs
> work in isolation, of course, not the modified kernel as a whole).  As for
> the Section 7 issue, note that a court judgement or allegation of
> infringement must 'impose conditions'.  Has this happened?  If so the other
> kernel authors may have grounds to sue to stop distribution by whomever the
> connditions have been imposed upon.

The NSA paid a sum of money (rumored to be $2M) to SCC to write a Linux 
kernel patch to be distributed under the GPL which implements their patents.

The issue is that SCC was paid to write code for GPL release.  Claiming 
otherwise would probably be a breach of their contract with the NSA...

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