Re: [Savannah-register-public] [task #11582] Submission of RFree

[Karl Berry]

Hi Maggie,

(Really should be doing this in the submission ticket, but oh well.)

    As far as I understand from copyright law, anything written by FCC staff 
    is automatically considered public domain. 

That is true, assuming the "FCC staff" involved were US government
employees.  The rules can be different for contractors.

    We aren't making any official statement about the code being in the
    "public domain."

What a useless FUD-generating non-statement by them :(.

    However, you are free to use the code, copy it, modify it, or
    otherwise make it available to others via the web.

That seems good enough, if they confirm it about the present file.

    label it as public domain now, but change the license info to GPL 3+
    if we make any substantial changes to it. Can you confirm?

Yes, that sounds like the right thing to me too.


Thanks,
karl