Re: RFH: Non-free files in Emacs
Files in the /etc directory of emacs21 which may be legally problematic follow.
If you can't stand to read this all, the brief summary:
* As well as the ones you spotted before,
DISTRIB, GNU, MOTIVATION, and gfdl.1 are non-free.
* There are a lot of files without any copyright or licensing information,
and upstream probably will want to fix this. I would remove a lot of these
even if they turn out to be free, as much of it is useless cruft.
ObLicense: I hereby give permission to forward this message or any part of it
(verbatim) to anyone who you think might find it useful.
-----
First, an oddity:
e/eterm
-- binary included in the source tarball! Debian's general policy is
to rebuild such things.
------
Second, files with explicit license notices which aren't standard
free licenses, apart from the non-free files you already identified
(The ones you already identifed are
CENSORSHIP,copying.paper,INTERVIEW,LINUX-GNU,THE-GNU-PROJECT,WHY-FREE).
COPYING
-- Non-free (verbatim only), but we make an exception for it because it's
the license for the program.
DEBUG
-- old GNU documentation license (unique copyleft). Free.
DISTRIB
-- Non-free. No explicit permission to make modified copies (verbatim only).
GNU
-- Non-free. "Modified copies may not be made".
MOTIVATION
-- Non-free. Reprinted with permission, no permission to modify.
OTHER.EMACSES
-- old GNU documentation license (unique copyleft). Free.
TUTORIAL and TUTORIAL.*
-- old GNU documentation license (unique copyleft). Free.
emacstool.1
-- GFDL-licensed without Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts,
or Back-Cover Texts -- so considered acceptable. However, it's
also irrelevant to Debian, since it's suntools-specific, so
remove it, just so you don't have to worry about it any more.
gfdl.1
-- Licensed for distribution, but obviously this is a non-free
document ("changing it is not allowed"). We would make an exception for
it if it were the license for any part of the package. If all the
GFDL documentation is removed, it must be removed too.
termcap.src
-- Mostly unlikely to be copyrightable: it's mostly a
collection of facts. But it does contain some extremely substantial comment
text, which probably *is* covered by copyright, thanks to the Berne
Convention, which you may have figured out I am not at all fond of.
The material in the oldest versions was
BSD-licensed; the material in the most recent version is
fairly explicitly made public domain ("belongs to no one and
everyone"). Unfortunately it's a mishmash of contributions by
lots of people with little care to the legal niceties.
Anyone who contributed to either the 4.4BSD version
or a version with the big "COPYRIGHTS AND OTHER DELUSIONS" hunk in
it (9.4.0 onward) presumably knew what they were doing, and anyone
who contributed to a pre-1988 version was putting their work in
the public domain. Unfortunately, I'd have to check antique diffs and
changelogs to see whether anybody contributed substantial amounts of
comments under other circumstances.
I wouldn't worry about it though. Frankly most of it is obsolete anyway.
-------------
Finally, files with no explicit license notice.
These are either free or non-distributable.
Berne Convention law is pretty evil in some ways: it assumes that everything is
fully covered by copyright with no or few permissions granted; this applies
to anything first published after some date in 1988 in the US. (Items
published in the US prior to 1988 without copyright notices are in the public
domain, unless the author makes a big fuss and complains that the copyright
notice omission wasn't their fault and was unintentional.)
So the status of most of these depends on whether files with no copyright notices
at all should be taken to be "part of emacs" and therefore subject
to the GPL along with the rest of it.
Unfortunately some of the stuff in the /etc directory is clearly *not* part of
emacs and *not* licensed under the GPL, and most of the files in emacs have
explicit license notices, which tends to make me believe that the answer is
"no", we shouldn't assume that. (Contrast Linux, where most files do not have
explicit license notices, and the top-level license notice explictly states
that it applies to everything in the package without another license notice.)
Or it may depend on the file. The Zippy the Pinhead quotes and the random
email messages which people may not have wanted to license under the GPL are
particularly worrisome. Files like "README" and the "Makefile" are probably
best understood as part of Emacs.
Anyway, I list them all below. These are the license-free files which I found.
Most of these have no clear date of publication, and no clear author, but
where they do I mention it. Two were clearly published before 1988 and are in
the public domain; the rest do not have documented copyright or licensing
information.
The upstream emacs maintainers might want this list. GNU policy is generally
to put a copyright and license notice in every file, and I suspect the absence
from some of these files (like README and Makefile) is simply an oversight,
and that these files are in fact FSF copyright. Frankly this directory could
do with a good spring cleaning: anonymous cookie recipes are really not
necessary, and 8-year-old order forms are ridiculous.
BABYL
COOKIES
-- anonymous authorship
FTP
-- almost certainly too short to have a copyright
HELLO
-- almost certainly not copyrightable
JOKES
-- This consists of a bunch of different people's email messages, apparently
without permission to reproduce forever
LEDIT
-- email message from the person contributing ledit.l. Of course,
copyright and licensing is never discussed....
LPF
-- does the organization even exist anymore?
MACHINES
MAILINGLISTS
-- Last updated 1999.... emacs seems to be the home of cruft.
MH-E-NEWS
MH-E-ONEWS
MORE.STUFF
Makefile
ORDERS
ORDERS.EUROPE
-- Don't the upstream emacs maintainers ever clean anything up?
This is pretty obsolete.
ORDERS.JAPAN
-- see ORDERS.EUROPE
PROBLEMS
README
SERVICE
TERMS
TODO
Xkeymap.txt
celibacy.1
condom.1
-- Post-1988 (1992).
e/eterm.ti
-- Not copyrightable, as a collection of "facts" about eterm.
echo.msg
-- Released 1985 in US without copyright notice, so public domain.
emacs.bash
-- By Noah Friedman.
emacs.csh
-- By Michael DeCorte.
enriched.doc
future-bug
-- Email message by Karl Fogel <kfogel@floss.cyclic.com>.
ledit.l
ms-78kermit
-- Post-1988 (1989). Author "Andy Lowry".
ms-kermit
-- Post-1988 (1990). Author "Robert Earl (rearl@watnxt3.ucr.edu)"
sex.6
-- Issued without copyright notice prior to 1988 (1987),
so it's in the public domain.
spook.lines
-- unlikely to be copyrightable, so I would assume it is public
domain
tasks.texi
-- Post-1988. Probably not subject to
general emacs license, since it seems to be very much not part of
emacs. An essentially obselete document ("last updated January 15,
2001"). See ORDERS.EUROPE.
ulimit.hack
-- Note that this is a piece of obselete junk which should
really be removed upstream. See ORDERS.EUROPE.
yow.lines
-- large numbers of quotations from Bill Griffith's Zippy comics,
without permission. There are so damn many of them that it
worries me. (Unlike the other lists, which don't consist entirely
of work by one author.) I'd remove it. Any other people want
to weigh in?
And the license-free graphics files. These probably have a better
claim to be "part of emacs" and under the general license than the
rest, because there's no place to put a separate license statement
in these files.
emacs.icon
emacs.xbm
gnu.xpm
gnus-pointer.xbm
gnus-pointer.xpm
gnus.pbm
gnus.xpm
letter.xbm
splash.pbm
splash.xpm
splash8.xpm
OK, that's all. Thanks for listening.
--
Nathanael Nerode <neroden at gcc.gnu.org>
Doom! Doooooom!
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