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

["Williams, Gerald S \(Jerry\)" <gsw@agere.com>]

Joe Smith wrote:
> 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.

Cygwin core code is not simply GPL'ed. RedHat owns the copyright
and chooses to release a version under the GPL. They insist on
having clear rights to the code.

If you can prove that some code is public domain, everybody has
clear rights to it. I had hoped that publishing something as a
public domain project would be sufficient for RedHat, but it
apparently is not. They want a clear trail of accountability.

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> So, while someone did tell me that public domain software
> might be ok to include, practically speaking, we only have
> one approved mechanism for getting changes into cygwin - the
> person and the person's company who makes the changes must
> have a signed agreement with Red Hat.

I'm not talking specifically about Cygwin, but it would be to
everybody's benefit if we could figure out how to incorporate
public domain software without getting the lawyers all riled
up(*). This stuff is being donated to the greater infosphere
for the common good--there should be a way to Do The Right
Thing (tm) and actually have it count.  :-)

gsw

(*) - I was really thinking of a much more colorful metaphor
      as I wrote this.