[Fedora-legal-list] NIST "license"

[Jerry James]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway
<tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> NIST's statement above seems to only apply to their "World Wide Web
> pages". They're not declaring it public domain either, they're granting
> explicit rights to distribute and copy. It is notably more complicated
> to put something in the Public Domain in the US, so it safe to assume
> that no code that you might come across is in the Public Domain. When in
> doubt, ask.
> (There are some notable cases where we accept that code is in the Public
> Domain, such as sqlite and SELinux, but they're corner cases.)
>
> Now, if they say that that "license" applies to all code offered on
> their website that they are the copyright holder, it would still not be
> acceptable in Fedora, because they did not give us the right to modify
> code. (They didn't disclaim warranty either, but that's just stupidity
> on their part.) I strongly suspect that this license does not apply to
> their copyrighted code, due to the way it is worded.

Thanks, Tom.  I'll assume that the first person I reached was clueless
and try asking the question again.

Or I may not bother.  I've discovered that one of the outside files
they filched comes from "shorten", an audio processing program with a
"no commercial use" license.  There are truly open source programs
that do the same thing, so this is not necessarily fatal, but I'm not
sure I've got the time to devote to recoding NIST's software.

> P.S. Jerry, I almost didn't see your post because it got caught in the
> mailman spam trap. This mailing list is reasonably low-traffic, perhaps
> you should subscribe? :)

Yeah, probably.  I'm on so many mailing lists already, how much pain
could one more cause me? :-)

Hmmm, why doesn't this list appear on
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate ?
-- 
Jerry James
http://loganjerry.googlepages.com/