Re: mined copyright with no copyright
Hi,
Am Di 25 Mär 2008 03:07:24 CET
schrieb "Mauro Lizaur" <lavaramano@gmail.com>:
> I intended to do a qa upload to fix some bugs on the package
> mined [0] which is orphaned[1], and i got a lintian warning about
> the file debian/copyright where it has no copyright holder,
> when i asked to the upstream maintainer of this issue he answered me
> this [2] also i asked in comp.os.minix [3] about mined and got no
> answer so far btw, i've seen lots of packages [4] with this lintian
> warning too, and doesn't seem to be a big problem..
The upstream maintainer says:
> originally (i.e. ~ 20 years ago), we took mined from the Minix
> operating system which was a free academic project,
> and the mined.doc file did not mention a copyright.
> So no, I do not think the original author could claim a copyright.
> Also he is not reachable on the net, I had already tried that
> a few years ago.
If there is no specific license for mined, but it is taken from Minix,
the Minix copyright notice will apply. Last time I had my hands on
it (early 90ies) Minix was being licensed commercially, for
research and educational purposes only, see the license at
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/ld/MINIX-README.html
If Minix had been a free project (in the Debian sense), Linux wouldn't
have been necessary...
Minix3 seems to have a more free license, see
http://www.minix3.org/license.html
But that wasn't available 20 years ago, it looks like the mined fork was
made from commercial software.
Michael Below
--
Michael Below
Rechtsanwalt
www.judiz.de
Reply to: