Personally, I would assume that they are under open source licenses,
and that you could reasonably assert in court that the lack of copyright
notice is obviously just an oversight. But I am not a lawyer; I'm just
telling you what I would do if I wanted to use those files.
It would be great service if you (or someone) could figure out which
files in contrib/ are in copyright limbo, and write their authors asking
if they can either confirm that the files are in the public domain, or
that they are under the same open source license as the rest of
Subversion.
However, running this command in contrib/ and in tools/ indicates
that the task would be quite large:
for name in `find . -type f | grep -v .svn/`; \
do if grep -q -i "copyright" ${name}; \
then echo "${name} is okay"; \
else echo "${name} APPEARS TO LACK A COPYRIGHT NOTICE"; \
fi; done
Sigh.
-Karl
On 11/4/06, Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> wrote:
>
> [Peter Samuelson]
> > What am I supposed to think of the copyright status of files like
> > contrib/server-side/obliterate.py? It has no copyright statement nor
> > license grant. Since it is in contrib, I cannot assume the "default"
> > copyright holder or license grant used in the rest of the project. Or
> > can I?
>
> Then there are files like contrib/client-side/svn_load_dirs.pl.in.
> Blair wrote it long before r6908, where 'tools' was split into 'tools'
> and 'contrib'. Does this mean the copyright and license are by default
> that of CollabNet, or was _that_ policy put into place only later?
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iD8DBQFFTEvNXk7sIRPQRh0RAhkcAJ4tzeA3JrvR+H3DXTQJdykJ9bFVmwCg1lyb
> bvc+BcDouGl+XvwDrOmVCDo=
> =0zG+
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Fri Nov 17 17:45:53 2006