Matt Shaver suggested: > If your idea is to incorporate some of the public domain code into a > closed source product, then I would _highly recommend_ that you obtain > this directly from NIST. Alternatively, I believe I still have some old > source files that I know are 100% the product of US government employees > (or people like myself, who were at the time, bound by contractual > obligations that required renouncing any intellectual property rights). > I _highly_endorse_ Matt's suggestion. When I browse through the original source code modules checked into CVS I mostly can't find useful metadata such as the organizational source, the individual authors, and the rights of usage. You'd be on much firmer ground going straight to NIST for code you want to treat as "public domain."
I began work at NIST (then NBS) the day before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated and retired just last year. In all that time, we never reached a wholly satisfactory solution for releasing software. I won't bore you with the rich history and concomitant war stories (you show me your scars and I'll show you mine) but remember that NIST is the nation's measurement laboratory. There has always been a strong managerial sense that we really shouldn't be developing and releasing software because that's what private industry does but that perhaps we could if there were an industry-defined need, especially if the software delivered a test method, a measurement technology, or a performance-assessment procedure that had been developed at NIST and preferably if it supported a national or international standard (e.g., EMC and the NCMS rs274ngc). The NIST Counsel worked out a compromise in which software is treated as a published work (hence the "not subject to copyright" disclaimer you see from time to time). Most organizational units implemented this by requiring us computer-oriented types to write a NIST report to accompany the software and put the legalese in the report. All NIST reports have to go through a formal multi-level editorial review and approval process before release, and the software is presumed to be vetted in the same process as needed. In principle, all NIST-developed software states four points one way or another: 1) that the work bears no warranty, express or implied, and that NIST assumes no legal liability or responsibility for its results or its use. 2) that the work, as a product of US Government employees, is not subject to copyright in the United States, often with a boilerplate reference to Section 105 of the United States Code, Title 17. [An underlying issue is the use of public funds, which is why many of our contracts are negotiated to include similar language, as Matt remarked.] 3) that users may use, distribute, or incorporate the work provided an explicit acknowledgment of the NIST-related contributions to the user's work is made. 4) that users agree to acknowledge explicitly any modifications or alterations made to NIST-related work before it is redistributed. Some of you folks were already working with Fred, Will, and others at NIST when EMC was transferred to sourceforge and know better than I what the circumstances were. (My office at NIST was at the far end of the central laboratory building complex from them and I was involved with their lab on product data standards, not the factory-floor control and communications stuff.) I'm sure these points were made during the transfer but I don't see them in the files. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
