On 11/21/2010 10:21 AM, lakshminaras2002@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > There is no explicit disclaimer in the source package. Please send the upstream copyright holder/author this message: --- Hi, I am working on packaging ghc-failure for Fedora (a popular Linux distribution), and have noticed that it is marked as being in the Public Domain. This is a tricky legal concept in many parts of the world. In Fedora, we try to ensure that we have legal permission to use everything within it, and that everything is under a Free Software License. Since the ability of a copyright holder to abandon their copyright on a work and place it into the Public Domain is only legally possible in certain jurisdictions, there are a few things you can do to help us out here. 1) If you just want anyone, anywhere, to have the ability to do whatever they would like with these software works, then please consider giving permission for them to be used under the Creative Commons Zero license. This license is structured to act as a practical Public Domain declaration wherever that is permitted by law, and an extremely permissive license everywhere else. An overview of the CC-0 license is here: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ The actual CC-0 legal text is here: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode If you choose to exercise this option, please reply to this email with the following: * A statement affirming that you are the author and copyright holder of the aforementioned software works. * A statement that you give permission for these works to be distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons 0 license, as described here: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ We will archive that email in the package (with your email address obscured, if you wish). 2) If you do not wish to relicense these works under CC-0, consider licensing them under the MIT license. This is a very permissive Free Software license. A copy of the MIT license can be found here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/MIT#Modern_Style_with_sublicense If you choose to exercise this option, please reply to this email with the following: * A statement affirming that you are the author and copyright holder of the aforementioned software works. * Permission to use and distribute the work under the MIT license terms 3) If neither of the two previous options is acceptable to you, and you really just want to put the work into the Public Domain, we need you to provide us with the following information: * A statement affirming that you are the author and copyright holder of the aforementioned software works. * A statement which indicates your citizenship and geographical location (country is sufficient) where these works were created. * A statement declaring that you are placing these works (explicitly by name) into the Public Domain, and are abandoning your copyright on them. For example: My name is John Doe, and I am the author and copyright holder of Foo. I am a United States citizen, and this code was written in the United States. I hereby place the Foo software into the public domain. You are free to modify the package, distribute modified versions, etc. ***** Please note: Individuals in most of Europe (with the notable exception of the UK) can almost NEVER fully abandon their copyright, thus any public domain declarations from those individuals are invalid, and we are left with no license on that work. This means that we will have no permission to use, modify, or distribute it. Specifically, this is known to be true for France, Germany, and Poland. If you are a citizen of one of these countries (or in Europe), or were located in one of these countries when you created this work, please consider using one of the previously described license options. Thanks in advance! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. _______________________________________________ legal mailing list legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/legal
