Trent W. Buck writes: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Trent W. Buck) writes: > > > If a file has no license declaration, it *is not licensed*. > > Therefore adding license declarations is REQUIRED. It is *not* > > sufficient to simply include a COPYING file in the root > > directory.
This isn't true, in principle. In the U.S., the licensor doesn't even need to provide a COPYING file, or even say a word. Violating copyright is not a crime (in most cases, and even when it is it is unlikely in the extreme to be prosecuted until a copyright holder complains). All they need to do is *not sue you*. In the case of copyleft open source, you also have good reason to suppose that there is an implicit license (see below). In the practice of open source, however, this requires extreme trust on the part of licensees, especially since (as LZW amply demonstrates) such "implicit licenses" can be revoked at any time, leaving the users high and dry with respect to legal extortion. > > This applies to *ALL* files (that aren't autogenerated), I don't see any reason in copyright law for autogenerated files to be excepted. For example, under a BSD license you certainly could omit configure.in and distribute configure only, in which case you'd want configure to contain an appropriate notice. I think under the GPL you would be on shaky ground to do that because of the requirement to distribute "build scripts" as part of the whole work and source for everything distributed in binary, of course, but you never know what people will do with code. > > It's not clear to me if we can add a license declaration to a > > file without checking with the copyright holder. You can, but this is where "risk to licensees of depending on implicit licenses" enters. > > Are contributions to darcs > > - implicitly "GPL2"; > > - implicitly "GPL2 or higher"; or > > - not implicitly licensed? I would say they are implicitly GPL2, for sure, with "or higher" if and only if that's David's license. This is (a) the usual community practice, and (b) implied by them publicly posting (ie, distributing) their patches based on copyleft code to a copyleft project without disclaiming a license. However, that can be explicitly disclaimed at any time by the copyright holders, as with the OpenSSL exception that some contributers have so far not signed on to. The OpenSSL license is in explicit contradiction to the GPL, so I personally would consider it impolite to depend on an implicit license with respect to it, but I think the implicit license is still there except for explicit refuseniks. Unless there is a deliberate saboteur in the bunch, the principal risk is that somebody will refuse to allow their code to remain in Darcs. A deliberate saboteur might request damages or even call for a criminal case, but even there, it's highly unlikely that a U.S. court would consider there to be any crime or even damages involved, so the only thing you'd have to do is remove the code. > Unfortunately, release/openssl_ok indicates that correspondents > were agreeing to exceptions, but not an actual license! I think > this means we need to talk to everyone who has worked on Darcs so > far, and get them to agree to license their work under the terms of > GPL-2 or higher, with the exceptions mentioned in > release/openssl_ok. This would be a good idea, but I see no reason why it can't be done over time. Unless you're that afraid of copyright sharks, in which case my advice is "swim away!" because blood's already in the water. There are a couple of authorities for this kind of unilateral relicensing. First, the Wikipedia removed some DFSG-unfree terms from its instance of the GNU Free Documentation License (cover texts or invariant sections or something like that). Also, Eric Raymond wrote a screed on unilateral relicensing, I suspect with the advice of the OSI's lawyers: http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html#id2790762. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
