Re: License issue on tiny Javascript fragment
Colin Turner <ct@piglets.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I hope you can help and advise on this issue. I am packaging a web
> application for Debian, I am also the principal upstream author. The
> code is generally GPL v2 PHP. Over the years the project inherited, from
> a side project, a small fragment of Javascript that has no explicit license.
>
> The problem I have is that the code is, like so much JS, sitting
> available, apparently for general consumption on several websites. I
> have been unable to acquire a license from any of the authors (no reply
> to emails) and the code is so astonishingly trivial it's hard to see how
> it could possibly be re-implemented without it being the same code with
> different variable names.
>
> Any guidance on what I should do? The functionality the code provides
> (counting and capping characters in textareas) is quite useful and
> losing it would probably cause dataloss in use of the application.
The FSF's guidelines used to specify [1]
For the sake of registering the copyright on later versions of the
software, you need to keep track of each person who makes
significant changes. A change of ten lines or so, or a few such
changes, in a large program is not significant.
That wording has changed to remove the explicit reference to "ten
lines". So in the copyright file, I would mention that this fragment
does not have an author and mention FSF's old position. I do not know
how the ftp-masters will react, though.
Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@caltech.edu
[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2000-10/msg01035.html
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