Subject: Re: Copyright of Ispell Modifications (take two)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Jul 06 2001 - 19:48:30 CDT
At 09:48 AM 7/7/01 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
>On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
>> Now that the Ispell copyright holder has officially given you permission to
>> distribute Ispell with out the Ispell advertisings clause I would still
like
>> an answer to my basic question.
>
>This is up to Thomas Fletcher and Dom who made the modifications.
Is it?
I'm glad Geoff has explicitly confirmed that we can use his code, but I see
*nothing* in the license we got from Geoff which allows us to change the
license on any of his files.
Even if we could relicense our changes in some other way, there have been a
*number* of other significant contributors to our heavily-hacked fork of the
ispell code. This has been obscured by the fact that whoever moved the code
from other/spell to other/spell/xp wasn't able to preserve the earlier CVS
history.
For example, looking at the RCS-style info inside lookup.c, you'll find all
of the following folks:
dom
thomasf
tomas_f
justin
jeff
gecko@benham.net
paul
eric
davet
Scanning other files in that directory, I also found contributions from the
following:
henrik@lansen.se
hub
sterwill
tamlin
tomb
I'm no copyright lawyer, but given that long a list, I'd think if there was
any way for Kevin to do what he wants without changing the existing
license(s), that'd be best all around.
Is there a concern that somehow our contributions have "contaminated" the
code so that future modifications based on our version would have to remain
available to GPL programs, including us? If so, how? Would that be a bad
thing?
Paul,
trying not to muddy the waters
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 19:41:35 CDT