The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Chris R. Miller]

Brad Roberts wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Sean Reque wrote:
> 
>> Chris R. Miller Wrote:
>>
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> Christopher Wright wrote:
>>>>> Dozens of people have worked on Tango. Tracking who owns the code is
>>>>> nontrivial, as is contacting some of them. It might be impossible to
>>>>> get a license change cleared.
>>>> I understand that. But my understanding (I am not a lawyer) of copyright
>>>> law is that a couple of lines of code are not copyrightable. But major
>>>> contributors to Tango should be reachable.
>>> I too am not a lawyer, but I was under the impression that contributions
>>> to Tango are still property of Tango and subject to the global Tango
>>> license.
>>>
>>> Maybe someone should ask a lawyer...  there's a good radio
>>> phone-a-lawyer guy in my area I could call.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> There could be cause for concern. This is from http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
>>
>> """
>> Contributed Code
>>
>> In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, all new contributors to the SQLite code base are asked to dedicate their contributions to the public domain. If you want to send a patch or enhancement for possible inclusion in the SQLite source tree, please accompany the patch with the following statement:
>>
>>     The author or authors of this code dedicate any and all copyright interest in this code to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this code under copyright law. 
>>
>> We are not able to accept patches or changes to SQLite that are not accompanied by a statement such as the above. In addition, if you make changes or enhancements as an employee, then a simple statement such as the above is insufficient. You must also send by surface mail a copyright release signed by a company officer. A signed original of the copyright release should be mailed to:
>>
>> """
> 
> The number of people that have touched the runtime layer of Tango is very 
> limited.  The upper layers are of no concern for this thread.

Well why not try to establish a precedent for all of Tango?  Tango is
dual licensed Academic Free and BSD.  So long as Walter + friends
include a notice in the Readme file, it's completely legal for him to
use any or ALL of Tango.

That's a reality, since it's common practice to consider a note in the
readme fulfillment of the BSD attribution clause.  Most popular video
games do this to legally use the ZLib compression libraries.

As for the Sqlite disclaimer, I would think that's just an insurance.
Plenty of other organizations don't do that.  I've been on the Linux
Kernel Janitor's list for two years now, and none of the patches that
actually go into the Holy Kernel Itself are ever "protected" by any such
disclaimer from the contributors.

I would argue that by contributing to Tango/LKJ/Sqlite/OSS you are
implicitly stating that you're /giving/ that code to the organization.
No strings attached, released under the organization's license.

Just my $0.02.  IANAL, but from all I've observed, that is the way
things work (if not legally, then in a de facto way).

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