The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Chris R. Miller wrote:

> 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.

Tango as a project don't have copyright. It is kept by the individual
contributors.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango