Re: license for patch?
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On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Fabio Massimo Di Nitto <fabbione@fabbione.net>
>
> > Actually the author of the patch did not put any license on it and he
> > belives that he cannot due to german laws. He is cooperating with us 100%
> > in order to make the distribution of the patch possible.
> ...
> > Does the patch really need a license? and i case which one will fit
> > better?
>
> Whether or not the patch needs a license depends on whether it is
> complex and non-trivial enough to have a copyright protection of its
> own.
>
> If the patch is not a *very* independent work (that is, if it only
> fits that particular program, and the patch author is happy with it
> being used in every conceivable variant of that program), the simplest
> way to get rid of all possibilities of trouble would probably for the
> author to explicitly disclaim copyright (i.e. make it "public domain").
>
> A possible statement would be
>
> | This patch, which extends the Foobar program with the ability to
> | frobnitz armadillos interactively, was written by me, N.N., in
> | 2003. I hereby grant everyone an unconditional, irrevocable
> | royalty-free, non-exclusive, world-wide license to any copyright on
> | the work I may have in any jurisdiction; this license including the
> | right to prepare, distribute and sublicense modified and/or derived
> | works without my prior specific permission.
Thanks I think this will make things much more clear. I will let the
author now decide what he prefers.
>
>
> A completely different, and possibly more important, question: Is
> Debian actually allowed to distribute djbdns binaries built from
> patched sources at all? I cannot quite find its license, but Google
> tells me that the "djb" is D. J. Bernstein (of qmail notoriety); he
> usually does not allow changed versions at all.
>
>
Debian do not distribute binaries. Debian provides an installer that
fetchs the source, and build on the local machine. so basically we do not
hit this problem in any point. The user has to run a script to
fetch/compile/install djbdns. A simple solution will be to ask the user if
he wants to apply the IPv6 patch during the process, that is something he
can do anyway on a Debian system. (if this looks extremely stupid than I
beg you pardon due to my still limited knowledge of licence issues :) ).
Regards
Fabio
- --
vega:~# apt-get install life
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package life
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