graywolf (TimberWolf) and licensing
Hi everyone,
There is this piece of software called TimberWolf which was developed
in Yale University in the early 90's, and at that time was distributed
as open source. Later on, it was made commercial closed source, but
the latest open source code version has been maintained by Tim Edwards
of http://opencircuitdesign.com in recent years.
Timberwolf is one of the dependencies of qflow
(http://opencircuitdesign.com/qflow/) which I'm working on packaging.
In order to make the further development more tidy, we've forked
Timberwolf, and now it's called graywolf
(https://github.com/rubund/graywolf).
However, there is no "Copyright" notice in the source code files. Tim
was in contact with the "Director of Technology Licensing" on Yale and
asked something like this:
"""
If there is an appropriate Yale copyright license that covers this work, I
would like to add it to the distribution, where it can continue to be
developed under the terms of the license. If not, I would like to place the
existing code under the standard Gnu Public License (GPL). I would
appreciate it if I can get a legal opinion on this from somebody at Yale.
"""
He then got this response:
""
Your inquiry below was forwarded to me. Yale would appreciate it if you
would simply state that the software was developed at Yale. That said, we
don’t have any specific text that you should cite specifying copyright
ownership, etc.
Hope this helps,
xxx
""
My gut feeling tells me that we will need some more explicit open
source statement from the developers for having it included in debian.
But maybe it is enough to just refer to the email thread. They have
not said that Tim cannot place it under the GPL when he said he will
do it.
What is your view on this? Can we simply refer to that email and make
it GPL ourself?
Best regards,
Ruben
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