[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Legal Problem: md5 implementation

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 19:44 +0200, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> writes:
> 
> >> It should be enough to remove this license text (which is allowed since
> >> 2000) to make it GPL compatible.  Or, to make it legally perfect, remove
> >> the old code, take recent version of RFC 1321, copy reference code from
> >> it and remove the license text.
> >
> > Only RSA can remove the license text,
> 
> no; everybody can remove it because you can do everything what you want
> to do with the code since 2000.

No, unfortunately, an email saying "you can do whatever you want with
it" isn't legally binding. The lawyers have repeatedly advised us that
licensing in the code trumps EVERYTHING. You're welcome to disagree, but
this is the stance of Fedora.

RSA never bothered to update their source code, and since it is still
online with the BSD+ad license, that's the license. Even more relevant,
thats how it is in (most of) the included code in the Fedora packages.

~spot