foremost legality (GPL vs Public Domain)

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

This is a fork from the original code.

The fork is licensed under the GPL.

End of discussion.  I think.

--g

_____________________  ____________________________________________
  Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have
 Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent.  the
             Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the 
                     ] [ dumb.  --mcluhan

On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, 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.
> 
> 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
> 
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