Please forgive the long preface. As you should know, an update to XTerm is on the TODO for the next Debian xfree86 package release, 4.3.0.dfsg.1-2.
Bad news first: Before I can update the SVN trunk to Thomas Dickey's latest release of XTerm (#187), I need a bit of potential XFree86 1.1 license contamination cleaned up. More bad news next: As has already been noted on this list, David Dawes has asserted on the XFree86 "devel" mailing list that: Assume that anything attributed to me is covered by the 1.1 licence unless explicitly stated otherwise.[1] To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Dawes have never made an explicit statement otherwise under any circumstances. Furthermore, it is my understanding that he does not answer emails inquiring as to whether this policy applies to specific commits (I am not speaking only of mails to Mr. Dawes from myself, either, but from others as well). Moreover, Mr. Dawes feels that it is not necessary to explicitly assert his (or the XFree86 Project, Inc.'s) copyright and license terms in modifications that are made to the XFree86 CVS repository: [In reference to the XFree86's statement on their license policy page[3], "Refer to each source file for specific licence details":] If you interpret that to apply to every revision of every file in an active CVS repository, then you are kidding yourself.[2] (Why it is challenging to add current and accurate copyright and license information to source files in XFree86 CVS is a mystery to me, particularly given past examples of precisely that[4][5].) Fortunately, the changes made to XTerm in XFree86 after the relicensing on 2004-02-13[5] are trivial in nature. They are probably not copyrightable at all, and I suspect the folks at the XFree86 Project, Inc., agree -- but given the difficulty in obtaining answers to straightforward questions, and the XFree86's Project's recent fundraising efforts on their Web site, I'd hate to be mistaken and end up on the wrong side of a copyright infringement suit. (It is possible to infringe clause 3 of the XFree86 1.1 license even if there is no applicable copyright notice or license statement that makes it clear that the XFree86 1.1 actually applies to the file in question. Given that I know of Mr. Dawes's stated intentions[1], even if I don't completely comprehend them, I may be at risk for "willful" infringement under U.S. copyright law, and this is not a risk I am willing to take. The good news is that it should be a piece of cake to reimplement these trivial changes with a clean provenance. This would not merely be advantageous to Debian, but to anyone who wants to distribute an XTerm with a homogeneous copyright license on it (a welcome relief, I am sure, to those who have waded through the smorgasbord of licenses that apply to the various parts of the XFree86 distribution). Last time I asked for a clean-room reimplementation of something from my description, I failed to be strict enough in my demands to satisfy my paranoid mind. So this time, I'd like to ask that clean-room reimplementors quote the following material when they post their changes. * I affirm that this modification is my own work. * I affirm that I have not consulted source code more recent than 2004-02-12 from an XFree86 source code release or repository in the preparation of this modification. * I affirm that I have not consulted source code more recent than 2004-02-12 from Thomas Dickey's source releases of XTerm. [The previous item is only necessary because questionable code from XFree86 made its way back into XTerm; if Mr. Dickey replaces their changes with yours, future reimplementation requests may not need this affirmation.] * I refuse to assert copyright in this modification. If I am unable within a given legal jurisdiction to disclaim copyright in this modification, I hereby place it in the public domain. If I am unable within a given legal jurisdiction to place this modification in the public domain, I release this modification to the public under the following terms: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE LISTED COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S) BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. [The above affirmation is unfortunately complex due to differing notions worldwide about how copyright attaches, and whether it can be deliberately forfeited. The copyright license above is the MIT/X11 license originally used by the X Window System sample implementation, including XTerm itself, and is the license by Mr. Dickey, the current XTerm maintainer and author of most changes to it over the past 10 years or so. I did omit the final paragraph of the license, because it is not germane to copyright law and is already protected under the right of publicity[7] in the United States and elsewhere. For the sake of full disclosure, here's the paragraph in question: "Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization."] So, if you submit reimplemented code, PLEASE quote the above four asterisked items, and state your assent to each one. Please trim out my lengthy bracketed asides. Here are those easy exercises: 1) In XTerm's Imakefile[8], modify the first double-colon install rule to have no dependencies. [This will enable the install target to be re-run without triggering re-compilation or re-linking of code.] 2) In XTerm's resize.c[9] and xterm_io.h[10] files, replace any occurrences of the "SCO", "sco", and "SCO325" preprocessor symbols with "__SCO__". [This was part of a comprehensive update to SCO Unix support which was submitted to XFree86 Bugzilla. The Bugzilla report was attributed to Kean Johnston, but the commit was attributed to David Dawes and as noted above, Mr. Dawes has said "Assume that anything attributed to me is covered by the 1.1 licence unless explicitly stated otherwise."[1].] The files referred to in the footnoted URLs are from XFree86 CVS as of 2004-02-12, and predate the application of the XFree86 1.1 license. Please note that these can be reimplemented by a person with only a modest exposure to Make and C in far, far less time than it took me to write this mail. [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg05906.html [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg05939.html [3] http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licenses.html [4] Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [5] Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [6] http://www.xfree86.org/ [7] http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/publicity.html [8] http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/xfree86-CVS-pre-4.4.0-RC3-new-license-sanitized/xc/programs/xterm/Imakefile [9] http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/xfree86-CVS-pre-4.4.0-RC3-new-license-sanitized/xc/programs/xterm/resize.c [10] http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/xfree86-CVS-pre-4.4.0-RC3-new-license-sanitized/xc/programs/xterm/xterm_io.h -- G. Branden Robinson | One man's theology is another man's Debian GNU/Linux | belly laugh. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Robert Heinlein http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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