foremost legality (GPL vs Public Domain)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 20:55 -0700, Per Bjornsson wrote:
> 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.
> 
This is what I originally thought.  But then I read this section of the
FSF's FAQ:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCAssignCopyright
"...Of course, if all the contributors put their code in the public
domain, there is no copyright with which to enforce the GPL. So we
encourage people to assign copyright on large code contributions, and
only put small changes in the public domain."

Which seems to imply that Public Domain is not so much disclaiming all
legal right as it is putting the code into a state where it is legally
untouchable.  How that relates when submitting public domain code to a
GPL'd project is explained here:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCRequiredToClaimCopyright
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCGPLUSGovAdd

All in all, I think it would be okay, but we are talking about adding
GPL code to an existing public domain application so I'm not 100% sure
it applies the same way.  I've sent an email off to the FSF at the
request of the upstream authors but I don't know if they'll get back to
me soon on this or not.  Does Red Hat legal want to weigh in on this so
I know if packaging it is fine for now or should I just wait for the
FSF?

-Toshio
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