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Re: sunrpc licensing


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.


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