files with no copyright holder?

[Peter Samuelson <pe...@p12n.org>]

What am I supposed to think of the copyright status of files like
contrib/server-side/obliterate.py?  It has no copyright statement nor
license grant.  Since it is in contrib, I cannot assume the "default"
copyright holder or license grant used in the rest of the project.  Or
can I?

There are quite a few files in contrib like this.  In my opinion, you
should adopt a policy of rejecting files from contrib which do not
include a copyright notice and license grant.  If these be "CollabNet"
and/or "same license as rest of the Project", fine, but I don't see how
we can assume, at present, that this is what all the authors intended.

Re: files with no copyright holder?

[Peter Samuelson <pe...@p12n.org>]

[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

Re: files with no copyright holder?

[Karl Fogel <kf...@red-bean.com>]

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.

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

However, running this command in contrib/ and in tools/ indicates
that the task would be quite large:

   for name in `find . -type f | grep -v .svn/`;           \
   do if grep -q -i "copyright" ${name};                   \
   then echo "${name} is okay";                            \
   else echo "${name} APPEARS TO LACK A COPYRIGHT NOTICE"; \
   fi; done

Sigh.

-Karl

On 11/4/06, Peter Samuelson <pe...@p12n.org> wrote:
>
> [Peter Samuelson]
> > What am I supposed to think of the copyright status of files like
> > contrib/server-side/obliterate.py?  It has no copyright statement nor
> > license grant.  Since it is in contrib, I cannot assume the "default"
> > copyright holder or license grant used in the rest of the project.  Or
> > can I?
>
> Then there are files like contrib/client-side/svn_load_dirs.pl.in.
> Blair wrote it long before r6908, where 'tools' was split into 'tools'
> and 'contrib'.  Does this mean the copyright and license are by default
> that of CollabNet, or was _that_ policy put into place only later?
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iD8DBQFFTEvNXk7sIRPQRh0RAhkcAJ4tzeA3JrvR+H3DXTQJdykJ9bFVmwCg1lyb
> bvc+BcDouGl+XvwDrOmVCDo=
> =0zG+
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>
>

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Re: files with no copyright holder?

[Peter Samuelson <pe...@p12n.org>]

[Peter Samuelson]
> What am I supposed to think of the copyright status of files like
> contrib/server-side/obliterate.py?  It has no copyright statement nor
> license grant.  Since it is in contrib, I cannot assume the "default"
> copyright holder or license grant used in the rest of the project.  Or
> can I?

Then there are files like contrib/client-side/svn_load_dirs.pl.in.
Blair wrote it long before r6908, where 'tools' was split into 'tools'
and 'contrib'.  Does this mean the copyright and license are by default
that of CollabNet, or was _that_ policy put into place only later?