Gentle persons:
I was feeling comfortable that any copyright and license issues we might
have could be fixed "en passant" as a LinuxCNC 3 is being developed. But...
Based on a little grep/sort/uniq work I just did, It seems to me that
work has to be done in the existing LinuxCNC 2.5+ since it will continue
to be available for an idefinite period.
The following numbers have to be taken as representative because I
didn't bother to weed out repetition due to .po files and the like.
From the sources I pulled via git from master some days ago:
1. In ./src and all its subdirectories, I grep'ped for every occurrence
of "Author:" and found 233.
- Of these 233, 159 are blank, e.g., no author is named. I believe (but
did not check each instance) that these occur in files that declare
themselves to be "Derived from work by Fred Proctor..." or similar,
e.g., derived from work that NIST said was not subject to copyright
(contrary to popular opinion, there are circumstances under which the
work of a federal employee can be withheld from the public domain, but
they needn't concern us here).
- Of the remaining instances, the following authors are named in various
combinations
Alex Joni
Chris Radek
Eric C. Johnson
Fred Proctor (as "proctor")
Jeff Epler
John Kasunich
Ken Lerman
Les Newell
Manfredi Leto
Martin Kuhnle
Matt Shaver
Michael Haberler
Paul Corner
Sagar
Stephen Wille Padnos
2. In ./src and all its subdirectories, I grep'ped for every occurrence
of "Copyright" and found 617 (this is an artificially high number).
- Of these, 231 state simply a date and "all rights reserved". I believe
(but did not check every instance) that these occur in the same files
that name no author.
- Fortunately, many others do name the copyright holder(s) in various
combinations.
What's the problem? Well I'm may be just a dumb engineer but it seems to
me that copyright statements must have an owner, so we have a muddle. In
the case of a "derived" work, is it not subject to copyright because the
parent work is not? If so, what does it mean to say "all rights reserved"?
While the current code base seems well armed with statements of GPL 2
and LGPL 2 licensing, it seem to me that this same vagueness of
ownership creates a muddle. "Who" is granting these licenses if no
author is named?
Disclaimer: If I thought I had the answers, I would have written this
message differently.
Just my two cents worth.
Regards,
Kent
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