foremost legality (GPL vs Public Domain)

[Per Bjornsson]

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 22:29 -0500, Michel Alexandre Salim wrote:

> Would this be analogous to the GPL requirement that the recipient of a
> binary package be able to get the source code?

Not at all. Use of public domain works is entirely unrestricted; that
means that you can package it up and sell it as binaries without
providing the source code if you want. Or you can choose to include it
in any program under any license whatsoever.

> In this case, user of the GPL package would have the right to request
> the original, public-domain-only code. Either the GPL package points to
> the original package in its documentation, or the SRPM be packaged as
> the original tarball + a recursive diff with the GPL'ed tree?

Putting a work in the public domain means giving up all
copyright-law-related rights to it. This means that anyone is free to do
whatever the heck they want with it; one such possibility is to include
the source code in some other program and distribute the result under
whatever license one feels like.

Thus the reasonable solution is to consider the current Foremost a
_different program_ from the original one; it's a data recovery tool
that happens to include the source code from the old foremost which was
available in the public domain. The new tool is available under a GPL
license; if someone can find the original public domain source code
(just as the current Foremost maintainer did) and include it in their
own software they are free to do so of course.

If this was confusing, a summary: The GPL covers the combined work.
Nothing else is relevant.

Oh, IANAL either, but if some actual lawyer shows up and claims that you
can't include public domain code in a GPL-licensed program I'd like to
get a second opinion, at the very least...

/Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University