Hi Ralph, Ralph Corderoy wrote on Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 02:31:24PM +0100:
> Research Unix Editions 8, 9, and 10 will no longer have copyright > asserted over them. While that vaguely resembles the wording of the original announcement, in this form, it is a grossly misleading statement. For one thing, Alcatel-Lucent explicity says that they do "not relinquish any intellectual property rights". That includes Copyright, so they clearly and explicitly retain ownership of their Copyright. In stark contrast to that very clear and unambiguous statement, they do not explicitly say that they grant any permissions; the word "permit" does not occur at all in the document. Even worse, the crucial sentence is grammatically incorrect and does not contain any predicate. At least one word is obviously missing. If that missing word is intended to be something like "guarantees" or "promises" or "officially states its legally binding, irrevocable intent", the statement might be somewhat useful; but if the missing word is intended to be somelike like "plans" or "considers" or "hopes", then it is rather useless and potentially a trap. Besides, while they fail to explicitly grant any rights whatsoever, they do explicitly say that they do not grant "any rights for commercial purposes" - which is potentially another trap: For example, if somebody includes parts of this code into a compilation that is distributed non-commercially, suddenly parts of that compilation can no longer be used commercially, which users might not expect, potentially dragging unsuspecting end users into trouble. > https://www.spinellis.gr/cgi-bin/comment.pl?date=20170328 says they > contain, amongst other things, "graphics typesetting tools" so perhaps > there's something of interest to today's troff users in them. Something interesting, maybe; but given the vagueness of the statement, doing anything with it other than looking at it for historical interest seems fraught with multiple risks to me. In particular, i don't think including code into groff that cannot be used for commercial purposes and that does not have a clear and unambiguous license would be a bad idea. Yours, Ingo
