[ntp:hackers] Copyright notices

Danny Mayer mayer at ntp.isc.org
Fri Feb 10 04:01:46 UTC 2006


Dave,

I looked at this and my first reaction was, well then if they are
worried, they should pay us for all the week we've put into NTP if they
are going to use it.

However, there must be a reason lawyers are getting involved in what
would normally be free and open-source code and I would like to know
what that is. This can't be just about liability. It's not as if they
ship the code themselves or do they?

Danny

David L. Mills wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> I'm engaged in a lawyer volley with Oracle. The lawyers are concerned
> about the various copyright statements in the distribution. Ordinarily,
> I'd blow them off with a "what me worry?" response; but, I thought it
> useful to take a closer look. Following are options:
> 
> 1. Ignore the statements and somewhere under the hood stick a "made in
> Delaware with friends" logo in the binary.
> 
> 2. Contact each copyright holder and negotiate a icensing agreement.
> That's what IBM was trying when I threw their lawyer out of my office.
> 
> 3. Pull out all the separately copyrighted files from the distribution
> and go with what still works.
> 
> #1 is what everybody is doing now.
> 
> #2 is probably not possible, as chasing down each of the holders is not
> practical.
> 
> #3 is interesting. Most of the statements in the ntpd directory are
> associated with device drivers not critical for core functions. We would
> lose various drivers, the parse clocks and the filegen facility.
> However, the libntp directory is sprinkled with copyrighted routines.
> Many of them, like ntp_random.c ntp_rfc2553.c, mktime.c, memmove.c,
> adjtime.c, strerror.c, strstr.c are apparently for some function that
> could be either rewritten from scratch or redirected to a C library
> function. It's also possible that some of these routines were concocted
> because some Unix/Windows environment didn't have all the C routines.
> 
> Some of the copyright statements quote the AT&T/UC Berkely boilerplate,
> which as far as I know is no longer relevant. Can these be removed? As
> for the others, do we really need them? Are the holders prepared to do
> legal battle should the need exist? Is there an interest to pull out all
> copyrighted files and get the contraption to work again.
> 
> My course with Oracle and anybody else is to state that (a) the
> contraption was evolved over 25 years with at least four dozen volunteer
> students, professionals and hobbyists, (b) they all (so far as I know)
> intended the work for ubiquitous public distribution without fee and for
> any purpose.
> 
> Looking at the various statements, the only thing that seems different
> from this approach is the wish for the holder to be identified in the
> product derived from the software. Maybe we could do this in a more
> compact way, such as inserting a clause in the blanket statement that
> gives a list of contributors that must be acknowledged in the derived
> product.
> 
> Your brain cycles would be cherished.
> 
> Dave
> 
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