On Thu, Dec 01, 2022 at 01:38:28PM +0100, Adam Ant wrote: > [Stripping HTML formatting where I see it - could you please use plain text] > > Large portions of the core code base are labeled as LGPL-2 - There is no such > > licence. It is either GPL-2 or LGPL-2.1 > > A bit of history: > > Linuxcnc was forked from a National Institue of Standards and Technology > project called the Enhanced Machine Control (EMC). > https://www.nist.gov/publications/enhanced-machine-controller-architecture > -overview > > As part of the project NIST released code in to the public domain free from > copyright or licence - This code base was then munged for the want of a > better word by a few individuals outside of NIST and additional code added. > The munged code had copyright and licence notices added without the consent > of NIST. > > Whilst public domain code can be used in a FOSS licenced project, without > copyright (which by its very nature, public domain code is free from), any > licence becomes unenforcable. There is also the moral question of taking > public domain code and claiming copyright over it. > > Would the experts of Debian-Legal care to comment ?
Disclaimer: I trained as a lawyer years ago but I'm not a US lawyer - this is NOT a legally binding opinion. With respect, I think you misunderstand both US copyright and licensing law for the specific case of software produced by the US Government and its employees. Copyright for what the NIST employees have written remains with the NIST. The originator of any code - in this case the US Govt.- retains the moral right to be identified as the author for those parts that it has written. Because it has been paid for out of US tax dollars, the US Government requires it to be released to the public as public domain in the US. In this instance, the US Govt. is about the only thing left in the US copyright system that can do this. "Public domain" doesn't exist in most of the rest of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States By the same token, anyone rewriting/modifying that code also has copyright. The author of code can apply any license they like (and can distribute the code themselves with no licence or a licence that means that no-one else could ever distribute it because of a conflict of licences). LGPL-2 is a valid licence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License - 2.1 was a point release which also renamed it but retains LGPL as the abbreviation. Hope this helps Andy Cater >
