Hi,
On 8/14/10, Frank Heckenbach ih8mj@fjf.gnu.de wrote:
Rugxulo wrote:
No, it's not. Any of those licenses or definitions would be sufficient here. Even a very simple all-premissive non-copyleft release or public domain would do.
How so? Only if GPLv3 compatible!
Have you ever been sued by a big company, demanding millions and threatening to destroy what you spent your last few years working on, in a court case that extends over many years?
No, and I don't have millions (or thousands), so I'm not that worried! I don't want to say we shouldn't try to clarify, but we shouldn't go insane because xyz (informally) said abc instead of (explicitly / legally) AbC.
Anyways, Scott said Pemberton was well aware of his efforts but stopped responding to his emails.
What an argument. Since Scott now stopped responding to our emails, does this mean we can use his works (including IP Pascal) as if they were public domain? (Just kidding, of course.)
IP isn't open source and was never declared as "public domain". Besides, the only available copy is an "old" Win32 demo (limited to 200 lines!) from 2005. So good luck using that for GPC!! ;-)
A copyright holder has no obligation to explain himself or argue with you. In fact, they don't have to do anything, not to register the works or even put an explicit copyright notice on it. As long as they don't explicitly release it, the copyright stands (until it expires in many decades).
I'll admit that the term "public domain" has sometimes been misused, but I don't think so here. It (P4) is only like 4000+1500 lines (5500), nothing huge.
If we were going to use it, it wouldn't be a dead case (anymore).
I'd rather you ask FPC about whether they are (or will adapt to) GPLv3 (compatible).
: "He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but : the compiler was not," recalls Stallman. "I therefore decided that : my first program for the GNU Project would be a multi-language, : multi-platform compiler."
So why hasn't the backend been kept up to date? Are the GCC devs just ultra busy or anti-Pascal or ...? (Doubt it, but ....) Why is it so hard?? Lemme guess, RMS doesn't use Pascal.
P5 might not be a big deal (depending on your definition), but a (hypothetical) new GPC project would be. And this makes it a particularly bad deal to use P5 as a basis -- it doesn't help much (not a big deal, in your words), but it can hurt very much (since a legal threat would threaten the whole project). In fact, the opposite situation (using a large program of questionable copyright and doing some small modifications) is much less risky -- even if not legally sound, you don't stand to lose as much. So, unintentionally, you give a very good argument for my side. :-)
Bah, then make a plugin system, a la GCC 4.5.0, and use P5 in that. ;-))
Clearly Scott (who is clearly intelligent) thinks P5 is worthwhile.
And yet he didn't base his own compiler (IP Pascal) on P5. "That should tell you something."
Yeah, that P5 didn't exist then! He wrote several Pascal compilers for several processors over the years, originally in asm, later mostly in Pascal. P5 is a new adaptation of P4 to fully comply with ISO 7185 (instead of wimpy subset, which you also hate), esp. because P4 is PD and well-documented already (and a good test case for his own compiler).
Right. But according to Pemberton's website:
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/pascal/
"Included here is the Pascal source of a public-domain Pascal compiler and interpreter, the P4 compiler and interpreter."
Now we might be getting somewhere (after a lot of irrelevant discussion). However, this is a statement made by Steven Pemberton who didn't write the compiler (as you cited). The linked source code lists the authors, but contains no statement about (lack of) copyright.
Which, thanks to dopey laws, doesn't have to be explicit anymore, so they can wake up from their coma 40 years later and say, "Hmmm, I might be able to get $100 from Frank! Sue him, screw him!" (Thanks, Berne.)
At least one now has two avenues to pursue the matter when interested:
- Contact Steven Pemberton and ask him if he has a documented statment of its being PD
Legal papers?? From whom? Why would he? What if he lost it? What if there is (or was) no "legal" way for it to be declared PD even if the authors' intended that?? Gah, I guess I should just e-mail him, but as you know, that never gets anywhere. *sigh*
or if he used the term in an informal way, much as you do, meaning the copyright is currently not actively enforced; note that I'm not even sure if active releasing to PD is even possible under relevant laws -- it's not in many European countries -- though it could have been released under an "all-permissive" license, which effectively works quite similar to PD.
Scott can't even get Jim Welsh to contact him about the "model implementation". Like I said, if you try and try and try REALLY hard to contact them and they don't respond, are you still a big bastard for still using it anyways?? What good is software that isn't ever used again? Somebody please tell me!
- Try to locate the named authors and ask them if they or the university own(ed) the copyright, then ask them or the university whether they have released it.
"Hey, I found $10, I put it in the bank for 40 years, made $10000, is it yours???" (Wonder what the reply will be.)
P.S. I know you hate the baseball cards analogy, but most of them were from 1972, which is actually older than "pint.p" (1976). And yet I still wouldn't really value it over $100 for all of them (small box), if even. Hence I only paid like $2.25 (plus S&H) for insurance up to that amount, nothing more.