Fucking Copyright #98
Conversation
Copyright gleaned from * Anything newer than or the same commit as 4084bb5 's setup.py is GPL * Anything older than setup.py 4084bb5 is copyright unknown, unless it was committed by Matthew Wampler-Doty who's choice it was to GPL project (unless he corrects this), any public domain material since is considered to be part of the GPL-covered project * Anything with its own license is that license * Copyright is of stated authors and anyone who committed to respective files
ghost
mentioned this pull request
|
Thank you for this work. Note that “GPL” is not a grant of license; it is not clear what the recipient can or cannot do, under what version of the GPL. Some of the entries list “GPL-3+”, that is more informative: “version 3 or later”, I assume. Please correct these to say “GPL-3-only” or “GPL-3+”, or whatever is the actual grant of license. |
|
ok so that was 3 things
|
|
On 16-Oct-2017, Jeff Cliff wrote:
ok so that was 3 things
Thank you for working to address this.
The questions I was raising here are not so much about how to change
the files. Rather, they are requests to the copyright holders, to
clarify explicitly what is the grant of license.
2) "GPL is not a grant of license" has me really confused as to what
is being asked for, exactly.
The question is for the copyright holders to answer: What set of
license conditions do you, the copyright holders, explicitly grant to
recipients of this work?
A grant of license is some explicit text, from the copyright holders
of the work, that says something like “you, the recipient of this
work, are free to do x, y, and z, under [some specific set of
conditions]”.
The specific set of conditions can't be guessed reliably. It might be
“the GNU GPL version 2 or later”, or might be “the GNU GPL version 3
only”, or might be “the GNU GPL version 3 or later or the Apache
License version 2 or later”; or, well, any weird set of conditions, in
my experience.
This is one reason why the GNU GPL has useful instructions “How to
Apply These Terms to Your New Programs”. But again, the “you” there
can only be the copyright holder; we can't make those statements on
their behalf.
Without that, we aren't in a position to guess the intent of the
copyright holders.
…--
\ “But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have |
`\ examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.” |
_o__) —Carl Sagan, _The Burden of Skepticism_, 1987 |
Ben Finney <[email protected]>
|
|
Suppose for the moment that these copyright holders do not respond here - the may feel that they have fulfilled what they understood the GPL required of them. The code is explicitly under the GPL (different parts of the code under GPL3+ explicitly, some implicitly as the license permits - some LGPL, with some GPL-compatible MIT/BSD, some public domain, one with a (reiterating the claims of the GPL more or less) request. Does this not grant at least some minimal set of rights(eg 4 freedoms) that might comprise a grant of license? This seems likely since what ethereum seems to have done is combine many different projects into one 'working' thing, and the ethereum project or it's representative here isn't the same as the original authors of all this code. Caveat : one or two files might be an exception : CMakeLists.txt / test.sh. they may need to be removed/replaced/explicitly put under GPL by their licensors. |
Copyright gleaned from