Re: files with no copyright holder?

[Karl Fogel]
> 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.

I already asked Blair about svn_load_dirs and he said it's probably
owned by his former employer - he's going to check with them what
they're willing to do with it (preferably reassign copyright to
CollabNet).

This makes me wary about making assumptions. It's one thing to go to
court showing that the contributor put a false copyright notice on
something - it's another thing to admit there was _no_ copyright notice
and you just assumed.

> It would be great service if you (or someone) could figure out which
> files in contrib/ are in copyright limbo

svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-subversion/trunk/debian/contrib-license-audit

This is for 1.4.2. I only audited contrib/, under the theory that
contributions to tools/ are treated the same as contributions to any
other part of the tree, and are owned by CollabNet. Maybe I should
revisit that assumption.

> 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.

This is something I hope to find time for soon. I'm a bit tied up in
other things at the moment.

Peter