Hi Bernd, Bernd Warken wrote on Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 09:24:59PM +0200:
> This is about MIT licenses for `ideal' files. These files almost certainly do not belong to the MIT. >From http://www.users.drew.edu/~cvanwyk/cvwvita.htm , my impression is that the author wasn't ever associated with the MIT in any way. > In `contrib/gideal/files', I stored an `ideal' document > `opaque_MIT.ideal.ms', which is available as > <http://web.mit.edu/usrdoc/ditroff/ideal.man/opaque> > (so I changed the file name). Gah. You shouldn't republish random files you find on the Internet without first figuring out whether you are allowed to do so. > Other documents in <http://web.mit.edu/usrdoc/ditroff/ideal.man> > are also useful for `ideal'. Frankly, I doubt that the MIT has any rights to redistribute these particular files. How did they end up there? My impression is that the files below /usrdoc/ are ancient documentation provided for users of the MIT Project Athena more than two decades ago, then forgotten, and soemhow found their way to the Internet. It looks like the people who originally put them up weren't quite aware what Copyright is all about. Obviously, these files have been assembled from various sources. I see MIT stuff in there, AT&T, IBM, BSD... Under various licenses, quite a bit of it free, many without any licenses whatsoever, some parts explicitly non-free. The ideal files you are inquiring about have been put into a subdirectory of Kernighan's device independant troff, which makes some sense because Kernighan and Van Wyk both worked at Bell Labs before that time. From heresay, device independent troff was included in the Caldera release of Ancient Unix; but that doesn't mean everything somebody cobbled together with some version of device independent troff is covered by the Caldera license, too. > Does anyone know which license is valid for these documents > or where I can get this information? The task is to find some distribution of device independent troff that has an unambiguous license and includes these files. I tried and, so far, failed. The following distributions of device independent troff do *NOT* include any part of ideal: * Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs Plan 9: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/lib/tmac/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/troff/ * Oracle OpenSolaris Heirloom DocTools: http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html * AT&T Documenter's Workbench http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/cgi-bin/download.cgi?action=list&name=dwb * Fork of AT&T Documenter's Workbench https://github.com/n-t-roff/DWB3.3/tree/master/doc In conclusion, i see no indication that you might be entitled to redistribute these files. If you have put any of them into the groff git repo, that may already be a violation of Copyright and hard to undo (it would be relatively easy to undo with CVS, but it's quite problematic with git). Your best bet may be to write a mail to Professor Chris Van Wyk (the Copyright holder in the sense of the Berne Convention) and kindly ask him for permission. His address is available on his homepage cited above. He may be willing, and he may or may not be *able* to grant it; if not, he is likely to know, or at least get you started trying to figure out, who the Copyright holder in the sense of U.S. law (because that's applicable for him) is; it could possibly be Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, or the SCO Group. Yes, this does look like a mess, most definitely. :-( Yours, Ingo
