On 8/12/2012 7:36 PM, andy pugh wrote:
> On 13 August 2012 00:21, Kent A. Reed <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> (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).
> I am curious about how internationally "public" such works are.

Yeah, well, when I was employed at NIST we generally covered our ears 
and sang "la, la, la" whenever anyone raised that issue. It will be 
easier to design and implement LinuxCNC 3 than to make sense out of 
international copyright law.

Whenever asked, I would reply that my work was "not subject to copyright 
in the United States" because that's exactly what the governing 
copyright law says and exactly what the NIST General Counsel directed we 
should place on the first page. I never declared my work to be in the 
public domain because there is no governing "public domain" law and 
nobody but the NIST General Counsel got to interpret anything.

>> - Of the remaining instances, the following authors are named in various
>> combinations
> ...
> There seem to be several missing from that list.
> Seb Kuzminsky, Pavel Shramov, John Thornton, Jon Elson and, err,
> myself spring immediately to mind.
>

My apology to all of you, Andy. I reported exactly what I found, that 
only the names I listed were called out as "Author: xxxx".

I was too specific with my grep'ping, perhaps. My search patterns were 
in the style of the "title" blocks that are common to much of the "old" 
code and I was looking for explicitly declared authorship there to 
associate with the copyright and license statements.

Taking your name, there are indeed a number of files with code-comment 
headers of the form "//  Copyright (C) nnnn Andy Pugh". Like I said in 
my original message, "Fortunately, many others [e.g., copyright 
statements] do name the copyright holder(s) in various combinations." I 
do now see your name given as an author in some .comp files. I apologize 
for not picking up the variant syntax.

I won't defend myself for overlooking any authors, but, honestly, this 
wasn't my focus. I didn't need to name the authors for the purpose of my 
argument. If I needed a list, I would start with the comprehensive(?) 
AUTHORS file in the higher-level directory, ./docs.

The fact remains that (IMHO) a great many files have ambiguous 
statements of ownership of copyright, and hence of license.

Regards,
Kent


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