Hi,
On 8/15/10, Jonas Maebe jonas.maebe@elis.ugent.be wrote:
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.
The size has nothing to do with the term "public domain". Even if it were 20 lines of non-trivial code, it would still be copyrighted. Stop inventing your own definitions of legal terms (whatever you think they should be), it only muddies the discussion.
The point was that it's nothing huge enough that they can act like it took them 20 years to write and is worth millions of dollars. Their livelihood is clearly not being diminished due to our potential use of it. (And if anybody ever sues over 20 lines, I'd be surprised.)
And why should I stop inventing my own thoughts? Nobody else stops passing stupid laws! It doesn't bother them to legislate and change everything and force their ideas on us, even when it clearly wasn't thought out properly, so how is my random idea any worse?
I'd rather you ask FPC about whether they are (or will adapt to) GPLv3 (compatible).
FPC is licensed under the GPLv2 with the "or (at your option) any later version" clause. So it's GPLv3 compatible.
I looked and couldn't find anything about that, only saw COPYING, which did not say "or later" at all (except to say that the authors have that option). The compiler driver fpc.exe didn't say anything either (even with -va or whatever). Even the FPC website only says "GPL" without any version (although I knew it wasn't v3). I looked in various FPC/Win32 .PDFs too, couldn't find anything. So I tried, I really did. It wasn't THAT obvious! Please tell me where I should find it. Maybe I missed it in some obvious place (but GREP didn't help either).
Actually, somewhere it said "copyright 1993-2009, Florian Klampfl" (I think), though I didn't know all the other contributors had explicitly given him (in writing) legal ownership of their copyrights. I also didn't know you, Jonas, were his legal representative to tell us 100% positively what the license of the compiler, RTL, etc. is (but I naively assume you're telling the truth here).
I know GNU is more strict about this (Emacs vs. XEmacs). I'm just saying, sometimes you can't tie up all the loose ends, even if you try!
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??
Then that's tough luck.
So instead of building on publicly available sources, which have been available longer than I've been alive, we're supposed to let them rot "just because" somebody somewhere might arbitrarily throw a hissy fit. Wonderful.
We didn't invade their house and pilfer their silverware, just attempting to use what is already available (and without any mention of license anywhere except Pemberton's claim that it's PD, which for some odd reason is horribly dubious because he's such a devious liar, naturally).
P.S. We're all free software advocates here. P5, FPC, GPC are all "open source" (loose sense of the term)! So it's not like the original P4 authors are "losing" anything. They can use our changes and improvements! The only thing that they can't do is (guarantee successfully to) exclusively sell P4 outright, but you're basically saying they may want to do so in the future (maybe in another 40 years, heh, ugh).