Re: quicksort

["Ryan S. Arnold" <ryan dot arnold at gmail dot com>]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:31 AM, Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org> wrote:
> * Mike Frysinger [2011-11-28 22:45 -0500]:
>> On Monday 28 November 2011 19:00:48 Carsten Hey wrote:
>> > Everything in this patches that would be copyrightable by me (if
>> > there is anything at all) is licensed under the terms of the WTFPL
>> > 2.0 [3].
>>
>> unfortunately, that's not acceptable. Âif you want code merged into
>> glibc, it has to have the copyright assigned to the FSF.
>
> The code has been merged/ported from a quicksort I wrote. ÂI'm not going
> to restrict myself on how I will be able to use this original code in
> future.
>
> As licensing it under the terms of CC zero or similar apparently
> wouldn't change the situation, I suggest to cherry pick the changes that
> are not copyrightable. ÂFor example, the first commit (the correct
> placing of the pivot element) doesn't seem to be copyrightable.

Hi Carsten,

I'm not an IP lawyer so if you're concerned you may want to take
everything I say here with a grain of salt, but I believe your
understanding of how copyright works is a bit flawed.

There are three things to consider:

Patents: This restricts implementation. ÂIn order for the FSF to
accept code that utilizes patents I believe the FSF needs to have
patent cross-licensing (or some other use permit) on file.

License: This restricts reuse of THIS specific version of the code.
You may release different versions of the code onto the net with
different licenses as long as all versions originate from the a
version you hold exclusive license to.

Copyright: This denotes ownership of THIS specific block of code/text.
This indicates who will defend the license in the event of an
infringement. ÂYou may release different versions of the code onto the
net with different copyrights as long as you hold exclusive license to
the original.

Here's a bit on WHY the FSF requires assignment.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

Assigning a copyright on a COPY of code you hand over to the Free
Software Foundation does not prevent you from using the originating
code in the future for what you choose. ÂYou can always use a version
you hold copyright to. ÂWhat you can't do is use the code from GLIBC
that contains your changes because others may have submitted changes
that you aren't allowed to copy, per the license.

As the originator of the code, as long as you haven't derived it from
any other code, you have the right to contribute it wherever you chose
and to reuse it, even in proprietary products.  You just aren't
allowed to reincorporate non-licensed upstream GLIBC changes back into
your own source code.

In general we don't cherry-pick source code because we need to avoid
cross-contamination.

We will consider patches that you've cherry-picked and created against
the existing source as long as you've completed the copyright
assignment papers and the changes originate from you.

Ryan S. Arnold
(the views expressed in this email are not the endorsed views of my employer)