Am 30.03.2017 17:02, schrieb Ingo Schwarze: > Hi Ralph, > > Ralph Corderoy wrote on Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 02:31:24PM +0100: > >> Research Unix Editions 8, 9, and 10 will no longer have copyright >> asserted over them. > > While that vaguely resembles the wording of the original announcement, > in this form, it is a grossly misleading statement. > > For one thing, Alcatel-Lucent explicity says that they do "not > relinquish any intellectual property rights". That includes > Copyright, so they clearly and explicitly retain ownership of their > Copyright. In stark contrast to that very clear and unambiguous > statement, they do not explicitly say that they grant any permissions; > the word "permit" does not occur at all in the document. Even > worse, the crucial sentence is grammatically incorrect and does not > contain any predicate. At least one word is obviously missing. If > that missing word is intended to be something like "guarantees" or > "promises" or "officially states its legally binding, irrevocable > intent", the statement might be somewhat useful; but if the missing > word is intended to be somelike like "plans" or "considers" or > "hopes", then it is rather useless and potentially a trap. > > Besides, while they fail to explicitly grant any rights whatsoever, > they do explicitly say that they do not grant "any rights for > commercial purposes" - which is potentially another trap: For > example, if somebody includes parts of this code into a compilation > that is distributed non-commercially, suddenly parts of that > compilation can no longer be used commercially, which users might > not expect, potentially dragging unsuspecting end users into trouble. > >> https://www.spinellis.gr/cgi-bin/comment.pl?date=20170328 says they >> contain, amongst other things, "graphics typesetting tools" so perhaps >> there's something of interest to today's troff users in them. > > Something interesting, maybe; but given the vagueness of the statement, > doing anything with it other than looking at it for historical interest > seems fraught with multiple risks to me. > > In particular, i don't think including code into groff that cannot > be used for commercial purposes and that does not have a clear and > unambiguous license would be a bad idea. >
I guess the only solution is to ask Alcatel-Lucent for clarification. re, wh
