Re: Re: Handling special characters (\/:*?"<>|) gracefully

["Joe Smith" <unknown_kev_cat at hotmail dot com>]

"Christopher Faylor" <cgf-no-personal-reply-please@cygwin.com> wrote in 
message 20060525143449.GC12123@trixie.casa.cgf.cx">news:20060525143449.GC12123@trixie.casa.cgf.cx...
> On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 02:55:24PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
> > On 25 May 2006 14:45, Williams, Gerald S (Jerry) wrote:
> > > The code was released as PD, so there are no copyrights claimed.  Once
> > > you get a copy, you can do whatever you want with it.
> >
> > Well, I'm not 100% sure that means I can re-license it.  And IIUIC I
> > would need to actually *own* the copyright on anything that I want to
> > place under GPL.  So cgf's caution is probably correct and I should
> > really do a clean-room implementation of my own.
If you modify it in any way, you have created a derived work. That is very 
well established.
If your modifications are non-trivial, then you would hold copyright on the 
derived work,
so there should be absolutly no problems releasing the dirived work under 
the GPL.

There is considerable precident in the publishing industry to back this up.



> > I think it'll be ok to use the list of functions that you suggested as
> > the basis, however!
>
> FWIW, Red Hat's legal department (who no longer respond to my email) once 
> told
> me that incorporating public domain stuff into Cygwin was ok as long as it 
> was
> very clear that there was no claim on the code
>
> Unfortunately, proving that a company doesn't claim ownership is usually 
> roughly
> equivalent to having them fill out the idious cygwin assignment so, 
> AFAICT, this
> isn't usually all that useful an option to pursue.


I suspect that if Jerry were to post a scan of a signed document indicating 
that the company does not claim authorship,
or that the company has placed the work into the public domain, it would be 
difficult for the company to claim
they did not. Now, that should really be acompanied by a similar document 
indicating that
Jerry does not claim rights to the work, as Jerry could potentially have 
some claim to the work.
For example it is possible that the contract that gave the company any claim 
to the work was never
valid in the first place. Highly unlikely, but theoretically possible.

DISCLAMER: IANAL, but I spend a lot of time reading Debian-legal, so I have 
a fairly good understanding of
how copyright works.