Source code with no (explicit) licence
I'm afraid I have to open by uttering some bad words: "Daniel J. Bernstein".
There. I've done it. (Sorry about that.)
I maintain a list of all known ftp daemons for Linux, at
http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/security/ftp-daemons , including the
licence status of each. (There are 25 of them. Gads!)
Today, I was reviewing the list, and noticed my licence comments for
Publicfile (http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html) said "Unstated - does this
mean free usage?" That seemed vaguely unsatisfying, so I re-downloaded
the latest tarball, http://cr.yp.to/publicfile/publicfile-0.52.tar.gz .
The README file has:
publicfile 0.52, alpha.
19991109
Copyright 1999
D. J. Bernstein
There is no licence wording anywhere in the archive. None at all.
Nada. Rien de tout. (Publicfile depends on Bernstein's ucspi-tcp and
daemontools packages. They have the exact same type of copyright
statement and no-licence contents.)
Now, it's my understanding that it's (at least) desirable for a
package's licence to be self-contained. One ought to be able to
determine one's distribution and usage rights by inspecting the package.
Bernstein has, in Publicfile, created a situation where one cannot.
I'm guessing that this is deliberate, as he is knowledgeable about
licencing issues, and in other specific instances not at all cooperative
with the free-software community. (See: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html)
It's also my understanding that, strictly speaking, all rights to a
copyrighted work remain with the author unless otherwise provided. So,
one might argue that a copyrighted source tarball with no licence
wording is unlicenced, proprietary code.
On the other hand, one might make an argument based on surrounding
circumstances. E.g., Publicfile was put up for unrestricted public
access. If there had been a licence file in the ftp directory or on
Bernstein's Web directory, that might have been indicative -- but there
was none.
My revised entry for the package now states:
NAME: Publicfile
SOURCE: http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html
LICENCE: Unstated. Has author's copyright, only, and no licence. This
creates an ambiguous legal situation, as the author (who is
hostile to open-source software licencing - see
http://cr.yp.to/qmail/dist.html) seems to intend.
COMMENTS: Still an alpha version, at this date. Provides ftp and
http file access, disallows writes to the public file area,
does its work without root authority. By Daniel J. Bernstein,
author of anonftpd (which, please see). Requires Bernstein's
ucspi-tcp and daemontools packages, which are available under
the same non-licence.
My gut feeling is that a non-licence remains no licence -- and that, if
it were ever proposed for Debian (which it hasn't been), it would end up
in non-free following the "err on the side of caution" principle.
Thoughts?
--
Cheers, "Teach a man to make fire, and he will be warm
Rick Moen for a day. Set a man on fire, and he will be warm
rick@linuxmafia.com for the rest of his life." -- John A. Hrastar
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