Re: Potential LSR licensing violations

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 20/10/2022 à 07:22, Werner LEMBERG a écrit :
> Assuming that it is ok with <janneke@gnu.org>, we can put his
> outdated, GPLed code into the public domain. Harm, do you remember
> the history of this snippet? [For such historical research it would
> be great if the LSR was actually a git repository that gets eventually
> mapped to a database by a script. Sebastiano, is there any chance for
> such a thing?]


Why not, we have to check that he was the only contributor.
I'll do that later today.


> I guess the opposite happens, too: there are probably some snippets
> that have been incorporated into LilyPond code over the years.  Such
> code must be sufficiently rewritten so that the GPL can be applied.


Why? Public domain means you can do whatever you want with
it, including incorporating it into GPL code. You just don't
become the copyright owner of the code, i.e., the copyright
header in the source repository should give the name of
the original author.

It would be a problem if we assigned copyright to the FSF.
As you mentioned below, we don't do this.


> > What should we do about these snippets?  Delete them?  Introduce an
> > exception "snippets are in the public domain unless stated
> > otherwise" and add headers to them stating they are under the GPL?
> This sounds like a good temporary solution.  However, I suggest that
> we either get permission by the author to change the license,[*] or
> the code gets rewritten eventually so that the 'correct' license can
> be applied (again).
>
>
>      Werner
>
>
> [*] Here comes the benefit of transferring the copyright to the FSF,
>      which can handle such things without having to ask the original
>      author AFAIK.  LilyPond, however, inspite of being a GNU project,
>      doesn't ask contributors for such a copyright transfer.


(OT) Yes. On the other hand, it's pretty burdensome administratively.
I'm glad LilyPond does not do this. Guile recently stopped doing it,
for this reason. So did GCC last year.