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Re: sunrpc licensing
- From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos at systemhalted dot org>
- To: Ángel González <keisial at gmail dot com>
- Cc: nlmills at clemson dot edu, Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>, "Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>, Andreas Jaeger <aj at suse dot com>, libc-help at sourceware dot org
- Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2013 15:31:19 -0400
- Subject: Re: sunrpc licensing
- References: <CAPB6HhsWNr16O7Vf7vQL+OOP7NGXaAEkPUMnMkbGT5=gbUSonw at mail dot gmail dot com> <CAE2sS1jJwaCYO+N=wQN-kFfvZ1NZQcnt2MA8_RsZXDxp7xSaQw at mail dot gmail dot com> <520297A8 dot 8070007 at gmail dot com>
On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Ángel González <keisial@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/08/13 19:36, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 1:22 AM, Nicholas Mills<nlmills@g.clemson.edu>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Under what license is the file sunrpc/xdr.c? Is it covered solely by
>>> the Oracle license at the top of the file or are the modifications
>>> covered also by the GPL? In short, if I copied the file sunrpc/xdr.c
>>> into my software product am bound by the requirements of the GPL?
>>
>> That's a very interesting question.
>>
>> Even as an FSF steward of the glibc project I'm not entirely aware of
>> the history of all of the donated code to the project.
>>
>> I'd be happy to document the history if someone like Roland is willing
>> to recount some of it. I can put it up on the FAQ and create a history
>> page for the project on the wiki.
>>
>> Roland can you provide some context here so I can document it?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Carlos.
>
> That file has an interesting history of copyright notice changes :)
>
> Most modifications to that file seem to have been trivial (eg. changes from
> long
> to unsigned lont uint32_t) and would probably not qualify for ©.
> There's the _IO_fwide changes (51028f34, 0ecb606cb and a334319f65)
> but that seems removed in df6f8969 (maybe not all?).
> Checks like 1ef32c3dc and a9f1795 may be important, but the biggest change
> since 1995 (when the 1988 file was imported) is apparently the addition of
> xdr_hyper in 1999.
>
> Given that the file itself doesn't have any additional copyright notice and
> that
> both the LICENSES file and the manual state «The code to support Sun RPC is
> taken verbatim from Sun's rpcsrc-4.0 distribution» I assume the changes were
> not considered worthy of a © change (so they are under the same license or
> perhaps uncopyrightable/pd).
>
> I am not a lawyer, FSF opinion may differ, etc.
The only note I will make is that we've been adding FSF copyright notices to
these files when we add legally significant changes to indicate that the files
are under two distinct licenses.
Cheers,
Carlos.