Re: A meager copyright. Remotely acceptable?
Hi, Mats:
On Thursday 01 April 2010 14:37:56 Mats Erik Andersson wrote:
> Dear mentors,
>
> I probably prematurely responded to an RFP for 'oftpd', an FTP
> server for only anonymous access, and only giving read access.
>
> The RFP reportee himself suggested GPL as the applicable license,
> which I now see is utterly nonsense. I could use the insights of
> those better understanding these matters.
>
> The only mention of GPL in the entire source archive are found
> in two specifications for building RPM-packages. Beyond that,
> the files produced using autotools contain the usual FSF attribution.
>
> That leaves __one_single__ file (oftpd-0.3.7/COPYING) expressing a
> claim of copyright. The text is below reproduced verbatim. As far
> as I can understand the text there seems to yield no possiblility to
> relate this to GPL, and to no other DFSG-compliant license either.
> Am I correct in this observation?
The COPYING file obviously states the intention for a BSD-like license. On
the other hand, GPL on the RPM-build files is not incompatible with that but
that leaves the question about all the other source files. As long as the
author of the COPYING file retains copyright for the whole lot (i.e. has not
copied anything from other sources), I think the best path would be approach
the upstream maintainer and ask him to clarify the situation of the other
copyrigth files. You can even go for the extra mile, once the author's
position is made clear to offer to patch yourself the files (after all, the
only thing it would be needed is adding a boilerplate header to all of them).
Without this (IMHO) standard copyright laws are in effect which means you
can't even touch the non-stated files with a ten foot pole.
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