[slime-devel] COPYRIGHT change - slime contributors please read this

[Bradford W Miller]

Well, I am not an expert in global law, however, you might just add a
copyright notice to the effect that the entries in these files are (c)
their individual authors. Because they contributed them explicitly to
SLIME, there is at least an implicit license of use that follows the
overall license of SLIME (e.g., FSF, or whatever), but even if SLIME were
public domain, you could not assume that such a contribution would also be
public domain, only that there is an implicit license to use in
conjunction with the use of SLIME.

Subject to debate, that might be worded:

;; Entries in this file are Copyright (C) their individual authors, 
;; attributed or otherwise. An implicit license to copy and use these
;; contributions in conjunction with SLIME is presumed under the terms of
;; the GPL, however, additional rights are reserved to the respective
;; authors. 

Along with any additional needed legalese (express disclaimers of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose; inclusion of the GPL
since I don't think it can simply be referenced as "GPL", which by the
way, appears to be missing from the SLIME distro, and FSF already gives a
sample license statement for how to talk about it.)

I think this would preserve the spirit of having made a contribution to
SLIME (that is, an author would certainly have the expectation the work
would be shared and used as SLIME is), and expressly acknowledges the
implicit copyright on such works, without the suspect action of a
declaration by a third party that the work is in the public domain (which
if relied upon on the basis that the declaration was part of the distro,
could cause a lot of legal problems down the road should one of the
original authors or their heirs eventually step forward and make a claim).

B/R

Bradford W. Miller


-----Original Message-----
From: mb at bese.it [mailto:mb at bese.it] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 7:30 PM
To: Bradford W Miller
Cc: slime-devel at common-lisp.net
Subject: Re: [slime-devel] COPYRIGHT change - slime contributors please
read this

Marco Baringer <mb at bese.it> writes:

> what should i do for README and HACKING where there is no single
> author?

what i really meant to say here was: what should I do for those files
which have no copyright notice in them?

The files in question are:

swank-ecl.lisp (juan jose garcia is ok with putting this file into the
                public domain)
doc/Makefile
HACKING
NEWS
PROBLEMS
README

-- 
-Marco
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
	-Leonard Cohen