Re: license for patch?
Scripsit Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org>
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 03:14:48PM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > But the original question was about djbdns-installer,
Oops. Didn't catch the "-installer" at first. My fault.
> But can Debian distribute the patch itself?
Bernstein writes on <http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html>:
| According to the CONTU Final Report, which is generally interpreted
| by the courts as legislative history, ``the right to add features to
| the program that were not present at the time of rightful
| acquisition'' falls within the owner's rights of modification under
| section 117.
|
| Note that, since it's not copyright infringement for you to apply a
| patch, it's also not copyright infringement for someone to give you
| a patch.
[...]
| Once you've legally downloaded a program, you can compile it. You
| can run it. You can modify it. You can distribute your patches for
| other people to use.
Even though I don't buy his arguments (if the patch is a context or
unified diff, it can very reasonably be considered a work derived from
the original source and thus fall under the original author's
copyright), I think we can safely take those passages as an indication
that Bernstein personally allows patches to be distributed.
> (After reading the random attacks on the above link, I don't care to
> read anything else written by that person at the moment.)
Take care not to follow the above link, then. I trimmed my quote
carefully so as not to endanger the mental health of the -legal
readership too much, but to do this trimming I had to read some
sentences where he talks about "free software" as if he had any idea
what that means. I will now need to go outside and scream and possibly
bang my head into a wall a few times.
--
Henning Makholm "Fuck Lone."
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