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Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2016 16:09:48 +0200
From: Sebastian Gottschall <s.gottschall@...wrt.com>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Re: Proposed COPYRIGHT file changes to resolve "PD" issue

any news?


Am 13.04.2016 um 22:35 schrieb Rich Felker:
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 12:57:06PM -0700, Christopher Lane wrote:
>> Rich,
>>
>> Our lawyers just got back to me: looks good to us.  Thanks so much for all
>> the time spent on this.
> At one point you said you would check the list of contributors you
> wanted to get clarification from. Does the list I put in the proposed
> patch look complete to you? I tried to include port contributors who
> wrote significant new stuff for these files but not anyone who just
> made minor patches to existing files or just copied existing files
> with minimal/no changes from an existing port.
>
> Rich
>
>
>> On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 9:14 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> wrote:
>>
>>> After the previous discussions on the list, I spoke with one of
>>> Google's lawyers on the phone. It's taken me a while to follow up
>>> after that because I was away at ELC last week, but I think we have a
>>> good resolution as long as there are no objections.
>>>
>>> Where I was coming from was not wanting license crap to be an obstacle
>>> to adoption of musl (after all, that's why I relicensed from LGPL to
>>> MIT in the first place) but also not wanting to scrub my/our belief
>>> that some of these files are non-copyrightable or retroactively claim
>>> ownership of something we can't own.
>>>
>>> Where they were coming from was a context of dealing with courts
>>> wrongly (this is my opinion I'm injecting here) deeming interfaces to
>>> be copyrightable, and having to spend ridiculously disproportionate
>>> effort to determine if the license actually gives them permission to
>>> use all the code.
>>>
>>> While I don't really agree that they actually have cause for concern
>>> in musl's case, I do agree that the simple fact that the current text
>>> is causing concern means there's something wrong with it. A license
>>> should not make you have to stop and think about whether you can
>>> actually use the software, and certainly shouldn't necessitate 60+
>>> message mailing list threads.
>>>
>>> The proposal we reached on the phone call was that I would try
>>> improving the previous patch to no longer make a statement about the
>>> copyrightability of the files in question, but to note that we
>>> expressed such a belief in the past. No new statement that we _do_
>>> hold copyright over these files is made, but the grants of permission
>>> are made unconditionally (i.e. without any conditions like "if these
>>> files are found to be subject to copyright...").
>>>
>>> How does this sound? See the attached patch for the specific wording
>>> proposed and let me know if you have constructive ideas for improving
>>> it. On our side, it's really the agreement of the contributors of the
>>> affected code (I have a draft list of them in the patch) that matters,
>>> but I'd welcome input from others too. Also, the patch itself has not
>>> been run by Google's side yet -- I'm doing this all in the open -- so
>>> there still may be further feedback/input from their side.
>>>
>>> Rich
>>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> kthxbai
>> :wq

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