Summary:
If you put a statement in the file, with the FSF's blessing, which says
This file is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Then there's no more problem and you can just ship the file.
So just go do that, OK?
...
Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
>I don't have any reason to believe that there is a problem here.
>observer.texi does not have an explicit license, GFDL or otherwise.
...which means, under current law, that you have no permission to copy,
distribute, or modify it.
(Except, perhaps, the implied permission to do so
incidental to using it in the particular form in which it was distributed,
for the particular purpose for which it was distributed. And fair use rights,
of course. Neither of which satisfy the DFSG's requirements, or those of
the GPL, or the GFDL.)
I fail to understand why so many people have trouble with this concept.
The ridiculous pedantry of _modern copyright law_ is the problem. :-P
Does Debian have a policy that it will include anything where no
copyright holder complains? No, it does not. It has a policy of
actually requiring legal license grants. If that policy is changed,
please tell me, because there is plenty of stuff which would be nice to
have in Debian where I think the copyright holder almost certainly would
never complain about anything done with it, but which doesn't have proper
licenses.
In copyright matters, Debian has erred on the side of following the law
as written and ruled upon. Debian could instead switch to following the
practice it follows in patent matters, of ignoring them unless the
ftpmasters think someone is likely to get sued. Perhaps this would be a
better way to go, but it's a massive policy change. Bring it up on
debian-project or debian-vote or something.
Alternatively, you could come up with some caselaw or a professional legal
opinion indicating that if a lawsuit happened, any person
using/distributing/modifying the unlicensed file would have their right to
do so confirmed in court.
Unfortunately everything I've seen of modern copyright law indicates that this
is unlikely. (I expect past uses would be allowed and future uses prohibited,
if I can extrapolate from the habits of courts.) So I won't believe a claim
that this is the case until I see references (and neither will anyone else on
debian-legal).
----
>The intent to use it under both is quite clear.
*Then fix it so it says so.* You have influence upstream.
FSF policy is to put a copyright and license notice in *every* source file;
I found this out while working on GCC. Now, that's *not* legally necessary,
but the consequence of that is that they do *not* provide good 'blanket'
licenses of the form "Everything in this tarball is licensed under the GPL."
(The other consequence is that the absence of such a notice is a *bug* which
the FSF should be happy to fix.)
I used to assume that anything distributed as part of, say, the emacs tarball,
was "part of emacs", and hence subject to the GPL according to the license
statement -- this was the commonsense interpretation. The FSF disabused me
of that notion by expressly licensing different parts of these tarballs
solely under GPL-incompatible licenses.
If you put a statement in the file, with the FSF's blessing, which says
This file is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Then there's no more problem and you can just ship the file.
So just go do that, OK?
Words fail me sometimes. I ask some upstream maintainers to fix a
serious licensing mistake, and they fix it. I ask most upstream
maintainers to fix a licensing mistake, and they respond "I don't see a
problem, and I'm not going to look into the topic, let alone try to fix
it, nyah nyah nyah, I can't hear you".
--
Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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