From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,35ce1c7836290812 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@gnat.com Subject: Re: SGI GNAT Question? (Long) Date: 1999/03/07 Message-ID: <7bu97u$49l$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> X-Deja-AN: 452236708 References: <7bflkk$78i$1@news.ro.com> <7bhlb2$h4n$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bia5u$3lt$1@news.ro.com> <7bkasm$rlt$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DE8585.2B5E6A5C@spam.com> <7bmbr5$j3p$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36DFA6FB.D3A2AD84@spam.com> <7bos1q$ogq$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bp6pv$2mm$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7bpjoe$eia$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36E25778.C056829@chocolatesaltyballs.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x2.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 166.72.70.180 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Sun Mar 07 16:24:37 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-03-07T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <36E25778.C056829@chocolatesaltyballs.com>, root wrote: Well a lot of confusion and misunderstanding here, so it is a useful opportunity to clarify things: > Note the use of the "if" at the start. Are you claiming > literal ownership of GNAT? what do your fellow > contributors ( from your mates(?) at NY to joe bloggs on > the street who sent in a GPL bug fix to a GPL source ) > say to that? Are they they ALL in unison ? The copyright for each part of the GNAT system is no secret. You can find it in the appropriate unit in the sources. There are basically the following copyrights around: 1. Copyrights that have been assigned to the FSF by NYU for the original work done at NYU (by the way almost everyone on the NYU team now works full time for ACT!) This was done by a normal FSF assignment. As always with the assignment document, the original assignee retains an unlimited license to do anything they want with the program, but that license rests with NYU, and they are unlikely to excercise it. 2. Copyrights that have been assigned to FSF by ACT for follow on work. Obviously we could use our own copyright for fixes and improvements to the basic GNAT modules, but we choose not to, because it is our corporate policy that all FSF copyrighted units continue to have the full FSF copyright (see more discusssion below). 3. Copyrights that ACT holds. These are used for major components developed after the NYU contract, some examples are the SPITBOL routines in the GNAT library, and the JGNAT backend. ACT is commited to releasing these components under the GPL including future versions, but as I have pointed out, this is a function of corporate policy, not of the legal requirements of the GPL. 4. Copyrights held by third paries. Examples are the tasking units which have an FSU copyright. These are all covered by the GPL, and that is the basis on which ACT uses these units. We intend to continue to provide them in GPL'ed form, but of course the third party copyright holders could excercise their rights to make non-GPL'ed versions in the future. > because if one of those contributors says NO, end of > story. Well it is worse than this if you think about it. What if someone makes a fix that is not under the GPL, then you have a deriviative work that cannot be distributed without the explicit permission of both copyright holders (because of course the GPL one one part does not permit you to distribute other things not covered by the GPL). Note that in this case the holder of the copyright on the non-GPL'ed modification cannot distribute the combined work, since the GPL prevents this. What the FSF does, and what we do, is to accept changes only if the copyright situation is dealt with satisfactorily. There are various possibilities here 1. Small fixes are considered de minimis and non-copyrightable. A usual standard has been that anything up to ten lines is covered by this (this is the standard that for example gcc has used). We prefer to treat even small changes as in para 2 following where possible, but certainly if someone points out that a word is wrongly spelled in the documentation, they do not have an enforcable copyright interest in the correct spelling :-) 2. Larger contributions must involve either an assignment of copyright, or a waiver of copyright interest. At ACT, we have a large file of such waivers on hand, and that is a normal procedure for the maintenance of GPL'ed software. It is just not feasible to have a single file in which many different people have a legal copyright interest. 3. Public domain work of any kind is of course not a problem. Essentially this is work for which the author has in advance issued a waiver. 4. Completely separate units can be incorporated into GNAT with the original author's copyright where appropriate. > What would the original US government dept that sponsored > the development of a "free" compiler say to that? The contract with the US government had two requirements: 1. All units were to be released under the GPL or LGPL (we later decided on the more permissive GNAT modified GPL for the latter purpose). 2. All copyrights were to be assigned to the FSF Most certainly the original US government dept that sponsored GNAT has no control or say in what happens at this stage. The contract was completed, and the conditions of the contract were met to the satisfaction of the government auditors. If ACT or some other entity had decided to maintain GNAT on a proprietary basis (the GPL makes this trickier but by no means impossible), then that would have been too bad but not a contract violation. Really what I am stressing here is that neither the GPL nor the expired government contract require that GNAT be handled in a completely open manner (e.g. that public releases continue to be made). This is a function of clearly stated ACT policy. I constantly run into people who think that ACT is somehow, by someone, or something, *required* to make public releases of GNAT. But this is definitely not the case, it is something we are committed to do, because we feel it is an important contribution to the Ada community. The ACT policy here has been absolutely clear from the start, and I will restate it again, so there can be no confusion: "It is the policy of Ada Core Technologies, and ACT/EUrope, that GNAT and its associated tool set will continue to be distributed under the GPL (or GGPL) and that public versions will be released from time to time that reflect the complete state of the technology in open source form." > If I or anyone who came by the GNAT source through the > GPL modified it and released it to others it would have > to be GPL as stated in section 4 and 5. If you have a legitimate license (the GPL in this case), you can certainly modify it and distribute the modification in any form allowed by the GPL (your modification does not have to be under the GPL, it can be under a more liberal license, e.g. be in the public domain, that is up to you). For ACT to incorporate this change into the mainstream sources, the copyright issue would have to be resolved as described above. > What you are saying is that you never can by the source > through the GPL therefore you are not covered by it. > Interesting point. No no, that's not quite right. The *copyright holder* does not need a license to use their own stuff. They can do anything they like. In the case of ACT, we definitely need a license to use other people's copyrighted software: 1. The components where the FSF holds the copyright 2. The components where some third party (e.g. FSU) holds the copyright and we rely on the GPL for this access. For units to which ACT holds the copyright, we certainly need no license at all! > but it only takes one other contributor to say that their > code fix which you incorporated was released under the > GPL for you to be bound by it. As I made clear above, we would never incorporate changes without resolving the copyright issue as above. Note that in the case of assignments, we would use the FSF assignment form which is an unusual one, because it constrains the recipient of the assignment to continue distribution under the GPL. Suppose for example, you right some GPL'ed unit, you then assign the copyright in the normal manner to IBM. They then make a proprietary version, which they hold the copyright to, and refuse to license it, even to you. Sound unfair? Yup, but this kind of assignment is not uncommon (most authors have to execute such assignments to their publishers for example). The FSF assignment, which ACT would also use, has two important extra conditions: 1. It constrains the assignee (FSF or ACT) to always release future modifications and versions under the GPL. 2. It grants an unlimited license back to the assignor > ALL versions of GNAT are GPL and they always will be, > Richard Stallman probably has a quad of legal cash > waiting for the first commercial enterprise to abuse the > GPL, as that would set the precedent. Richard Stallman would only have legal standing if we did something inappropriate with an FSF copyrighted component, and even there it would not be Richard Stallman, but rather the FSF that had standing. The GPL itself is a license which is a contract between two parties. There are only two kinds of legal redress available, violations of the contract under contract law, which of course can only involve the parties to the contract, and copyright violations, which can only involve the copyright holder. If FSF is neither a party to the contract, nor the copyright holder, then they are not an interested party. Richard Stallman might or might not give his opinion on the appropriate interpretation of the GPL, and might for example be an expert witness on one side or the other in any legal proceeding, but would not otherwise have standing. I often find this is a confusion, people somehow think that any instance of the GPL involves the FSF. This of course is not the case. The GPL is just a license which anyone is free to use in any situation they like. > You can no more take GNAT back, that Larry Walls, Linus > Torvalds and Richard Stallman could take back perl, > linux, or emacs. Well you are probably right from a practical point of view, but the point is that nothing would legally prevent these authors from trying to make a proprietary version of their work. Surely they would fail in the attempt. > > When you get a licensed product from Microsoft, you > > know perfectly well that they still own the program and > > can do anything they like with it. > > So you have to use Microsoft as an example to make > yourself look good in the GPL world ? That's an odd statement. This has nothing to do with looking good, it has to do with legal requirements of the GPL, which is what we are discussing. The point here is that historically, lawyers for large companies have often been very suspicious of the GPL, because they think something funny is going on (indeed this message which I am responding too makes an attempt to reinforce this incorrect viewpoint). Realizing that the GPL is just a license, no different in fundamental legal structure form the licenses that Microsoft grants is very helpful, because it makes large companies see that there is nothing to be afraid of in using GPL'ed software. We have spent a lot of time working with large companies to alleviate concerns of this kind. > > Well there is *nothing* unusual about the GPL in this > > regard, it is simply a limited license giving the > > recipient of the license certain limited rights to use > > the copyrighted works. > The terms copyleft Actually this is not a technical term, but just a popular one. It is probably unfortunate since it has tended to create the impression that GPL'ed software is not copyrighted, but rather exists in some strange legal state different from copyright. Note that the GPL itself (quite deliberately) does NOT use the term copyleft. > and its simply a licence as a Rolls Royce and a Lada > are cars. Now *there* we can agree. The Rolls Royce and the Lada are of course just cars, but they are cars you would like to have if you have the choice. The GPL is indeed a Rolls-Royce of licenses from the point of view of the licensor, and helping companies to realize that this is the case, and helping them to realize that the GPL is highly desirable from their point of view is what this is all about. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own