Re: [sdcc-devel] Licensing and building from real source (original) (raw)

Steve Langasek schrieb:

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 01:53:58PM +0200, Michael Below wrote:

Am Mi 11 Jul 2007 13:07:03 CEST schrieb Bas Wijnen wijnen@debian.org:

      The  ASxxxx  assemblers  and the ASLINK relocating linker

are placed in the Public Domain. Publication or distribution of these programs for non-commercial use is hereby granted with the stipulation that the copyright notice be included with all copies. To my understanding, the above doesn't put the work in the Public Domain because German law doesn't recognize the author's ability to put works in the Public Domain.

That's true, the author keeps his Urheberrecht in german law, declaring something as Public Domain is understood as an unrestricted general license.

But thats's not the point I wanted to make. The text we are discussing uses the legal term Public Domain in the context of a license, granting certain rights under certain restrictions. This doesn't fit with the US legal concept of Public Domain. But it does fit with a layman's understanding of Public Domain as a license saying "everybody may use it", with a condition added on top.

I think it is necessary to interpret this paragraph as a whole, asking what the author wanted to tell us. It is one statement, and it makes sense as one statement, if you allow for the fact that the author of this license might have been not a lawyer.

It's still a contradiction though, as Bas says, and it would be ideal to have this ambiguity cleared up.

In the end I agree, I does make sense to contact the licensor, to relicense this under a better license, maybe 3-clause BSD or something like that.

Michael Below

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