Lotus5 module for JtR, copyright issues

[David Paleino]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:54:30 +0100, bartavelle wrote:

> David Paleino wrote:
> > Hello,
> 
> Hi,

Thank you for your fast reply.

> > I wanted to integrate the Lotus5 module into the Debian package of
> > john. Some issues were encountered in src/lotus5_fmt.c, and I'm writing you
> > because that's the only contact available in the source code.
> > 
> > 1) Is Jeff Fay contactable in any way? A contact (preferably an e-mail
> > address) would be great, but this is not a show-stopper to me (but I should
> > ask debian-legal guys, to be sure)
> 
> I can't find any email from him in my mailbox. It seems that I never 
> contacted him, but it was a while ago and I'm not sure anymore. If I did 
> contact him, I googled contact information.

Ok, I'll try myself, then.

> > 2) A copyright holder is missing for you, your real name would be best [0]
> 
> I'd rather use my pseudonym. It's not too hard to find my real name from 
> this, just from the WHOIS records.

Yes, but didn't want to disclose it :-)
Ok then, I will use the pseudonym. Even though I'm not really sure if that's
acceptable in court.

> > 3) A licensing statement is missing at all. Could you please choose a
> > DFSG-free license? Common are GPL, BSD and MIT/X11 (there are many others),
> > but also Public Domain is fine.
> 
> I'm not the original author of this, so I would not presume on his 
> intentions.

That's why I asked you his e-mail address.

> However, as JtR is GPLv2, I'd say that all patches are implicitly GPLv2. You
> might want to contact debian-legal for an endless argument on this subject :)

Heh, not really. I'm not talking about the copyright of the patch itself (you
might patch different files, each differently licensed), but about the
copyright of newly created files (which is common when adding new formats to
JtR), and that's not influenced by JtR copyright -- I already have patches
creating files in the Public Domain.

Kindly,
David

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