Re: licensing question for nom.tam.fits
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Dear Francesco, fortunately, the upstream author Thomas MyGlynn made a new release for which he added a statement that the code is in the public domain. In my debian package which can be found at http://mentors.debian.net/package/fits or http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-science/packages/fits.git I chose the GPL-3 for the debian/* files but a guy from the debian-science mailing list suggested to put the Debian package under a less restrictive license. Thus my question is which license should be chosen in the case that the sources are in the public domain? Best regards, Florian Am 28.08.2012 19:19, schrieb Francesco Poli: On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:37:46 +0200 Florian Rothmaier wrote: Hi to everyone involved in debian-legal, Hello! I've got a licensing issue related to the astronomical Java library fits (nom.tam.fits) from Thomas McGlynn. The newest release can be obtained at: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits/java/v1.0/v1.08.1/ . In the code, I find the following copyright statement: /* Copyright: Thomas McGlynn 1997-1999. * This code may be used for any purpose, non-commercial * or commercial so long as this copyright notice is retained * in the source code or included in or referred to in any * derived software. */ When I wrote an e-mail to Thomas McGlynn, he replied: I believe the lines you quote are themselves the entirety of the license. There was no intent to associate this with any specific more general license. Unfortunately these license lines do not seem to be enough to make the library clearly Free Software. I think they are far too vague and implicit: - the term use is ambiguous at best; does it just cover running a program that links with library? or is it implicitly intended to also cover other activities such as copying, modification, redistribution of verbatim and modified copies? - there's no explicit permission to copy and redistribute - there is a reference to derived software, but no explicit permission to create and distribute such derived software I believe that such license lines make the library unsuitable for distribution in Debian (main) or even in the non-free archive. Now, I'm not sure how to proceed. [...] I'd appreciate your help! If you want this library to be included in Debian, I think you should contact its copyright holder again and persuade him to re-license the library in a clearly DFSG-free manner, preferably under the terms of a well known and widely used Free Software license. I would personally recommend the copyright holder to re-license the library under the terms of the Expat/MIT license [1], which is very simple and similar in spirit to the goals that were probably in the mind of the drafter of the above quoted license lines. [1] http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt Thanks in advance You're welcome, I hope this helps. and please cc me in your replies since I'm not subscribed to debian-legal. Done. Bye and good luck with your persuasion effort! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJQuK4sAAoJEGXz/obPl241LcoQAK51ae/DGV8zhAWSOaHGPsRb lhEXt8gZgTtlBC1+UPL/YGAiHGjDKvZaesCdpDs97I5sraTgRHp/wtIxKliQcfvl LLIQMVuUFFEFGApdK2h31M3y6NzpwJVxTUa0o939oy2LBX714S1rRzqvyVl7i+c+ GsrGwtEsPF2beVHaiIF/Gi1fQeFILoyiPLYhtqIeB0vB4tDbk5K8S0W3kgmY3czI lqrjmJyfkry3x2ngLOZmH9wd7OqstYhVrWStXR/mw0X5cs75AGAlWhbYR0XHdtP+ g5SoLlp8uqlt2ENuzMBHxnyZKjBQIUXv2OpLDjWcCsDC87sD3zXqVqWCp58DfGXT H4w7JIhZ1IAR1k5zQ4D5fAKWogbt7Xvn2H+pim8QHVnXJUfCjGnO3Kzb7g4tShXL WKpCMo6ae7ctjarwLovGHFoWhhL7Q7K0ONhcT6ZzLxOc3nZzRRLVIkjRqPsPVKqi dfUeYQbnvcjWSnOiz+VJi/WIsjHK05OL41FWB1rPFwjMHtsi+NN9RGWN0/nYQSUT u6YoG3cO3XI7Z6hJBRomC9PhGyWasa8t/GkPeJsfqp1hAdG5k3Z4q+EKOlNUrDWh 8F+qDXhB3tqHSMivwGCkshEgoxxkVb9OGUoRu3biSxSiL3TreA10Y3QaGK5aSA6r ka3f8QfRZjsZhvcenbZn =Sjag -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/50b8ae3b.8050...@ari.uni-heidelberg.de
Re: licensing question for nom.tam.fits
Hello, On 11/30/2012 02:01 PM, Florian Rothmaier wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Dear Francesco, fortunately, the upstream author Thomas MyGlynn made a new release for which he added a statement that the code is in the public domain. In my debian package which can be found at http://mentors.debian.net/package/fits or http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-science/packages/fits.git I chose the GPL-3 for the debian/* files but a guy from the debian-science mailing list suggested to put the Debian package under a less restrictive license. Thus my question is which license should be chosen in the case that the sources are in the public domain? CC0 is the closest you can get to public domain, while still giving out a valid license for those jurisdictions where public domain doesn't work. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ -- kuno / warp. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/50b8c055.9030...@frob.nl
Re: licensing question for nom.tam.fits
On Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:19:01 +0100 Kuno Woudt wrote: [...] On 11/30/2012 02:01 PM, Florian Rothmaier wrote: [...] fortunately, the upstream author Thomas MyGlynn made a new release for which he added a statement that the code is in the public domain. Hi Florian, this seems to be really good news. Thanks for informing us! [...] Thus my question is which license should be chosen in the case that the sources are in the public domain? CC0 is the closest you can get to public domain, while still giving out a valid license for those jurisdictions where public domain doesn't work. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ I agree with Kuno that CC0 is basically equivalent to public domain, while being much more robust for all the jurisdictions where it is not possible (or not clear how) to dedicate a work to the public domain. Hence, if you want to be as permissive as the upstream author, you are recommended to use the CC0 dedication. If instead you want to keep your own copyright for the debian/* files, but you want to be fairly permissive nonetheless, I recommend you to license those files under the terms of the Expat/MIT license: http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt I hope these suggestions may help. P.S.: I would even recommend the upstream author (Thomas McGlynn) to use the CC0 dedication, rather than his own homemade dedication (which may be not legally sound enough to be actually valid in most jurisdictions)... P.P.S.: I am not sure what you should write in the Copyright field for the upstream files, but (c) 1996-2012 by Thomas A. McGlynn does not look right, as long as the upstream work is really in the public domain (which, as you probably know, means that the work is *not* subject to copyright!)... The machine-readable debian/copyright file format specification v1.0 (http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/) is not too clear on this point, unfortunately... Maybe you should ask on the debian-policy mailing list and suggest that this topic should be clarified in the specification. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt New GnuPG key, see the transition document! . Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE pgpQFEVbBT8HE.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: licensing question for nom.tam.fits
Le Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 11:26:29PM +0100, Francesco Poli a écrit : P.P.S.: I am not sure what you should write in the Copyright field for the upstream files, but (c) 1996-2012 by Thomas A. McGlynn does not look right, as long as the upstream work is really in the public domain (which, as you probably know, means that the work is *not* subject to copyright!)... The machine-readable debian/copyright file format specification v1.0 (http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/) is not too clear on this point, unfortunately... Maybe you should ask on the debian-policy mailing list and suggest that this topic should be clarified in the specification. Hi Francesco, the 1.0 specification mentions for the Copyright field: If a work has no copyright holder (i.e., it is in the public domain), that information should be recorded here. Inspecting Debian copyright files from svn://anonscm.debian.org/collab-qa/packages-metadata/ I see that many chose contents such as none, nobody, public-domain, not relevant, etc, which I think are good enough, given that the content of the Copyright field is free-form. Have a nice week-end, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121201014747.ga31...@falafel.plessy.net
