licensing of svn_load_dirs.pl

[Peter Samuelson]

[Blair Zajac]
> I recall I was working for DemoGrafx at the time and they may own
> some of the copyright on it.  They since were acquired by Dolby, so
> we'd probably have to check them them to assign a license to it.

Yeah ... hmmm.  If you wrote this script "on the clock", they probably
do own it, or at least they have _some_ copyright interest.  (If you
wrote it in your spare time, of course, they can't own it unless you
had some explicit language about that in your employment contract.)

So I guess I'd advise contacting your former boss and explaining what
you did, if they don't already know, and ask them to either:

 (1) Give you the code you wrote for Subversion - then you can put
     your own copyright notice on it and license it however you wish
     (you can, in turn, do (2) at some future date if you want)

 (2) Give the code to CollabNet - same result, you can put the regular
     Subversion copyright notice / license grant onto it

 (3) Agree to license the code in some open source manner, preferably
     either the GPL or Subversion's license.  (I notice you've used the
     GPL for other contrib scripts.)

Best would be either (1) or (2), since then the Subversion Project
retains the ability to move svn_load_dirs from contrib to tools
someday.  It shouldn't be hard to get them to agree to at least (3), if
you already had an understanding with them that you were contributing
to open source projects as an employee.

Of course, option 4 is to rewrite svn_load_dirs from scratch, but it's
a fairly long and involved script so that seems a bit unproductive.

I should note that we just uploaded subversion 1.4.2dfsg1-1 to debian
unstable, and we hope to get it into etch, so it's probably too late to
rescue svn_load_dirs for etch, unless some other serious bug crops up
soon, such that we have to make another upload anyway.

          *          *          *

In other news, I don't know how you're doing with the ubuntu backports
of subversion 1.4, but if you aren't already doing so, I suggest basing
that work on our 'branches/sarge' which I updated this morning to our
latest stuff.

Peter
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