Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
You might feel that way, but the simple fact is that French citizens
can
not abandon copyright (aka put works into the Public Domain). This is
the only license that we've been given, but since it is not valid, we
can't use it. Without a license, we cannot include this in Fedora,
because we have none of the rights required for Free Software.
There are plenty of projects partly or entirely written by Europeans which
are supposedly "Public Domain", which all have this issue. A lot of that
code is already in Fedora. Even projects under the GPL or some other
copyright license may be incorporating such code, without even mentioning
it, since there's no requirement to mention use of public domain code. It
feels odd to single out one such project.
Plus, since Red Hat is in the US, doesn't US copyright law apply? What I
have read everywhere is that it's the copyright law of the distributor's
country which prevails, not the one of the author's country.
Have you talked to Red Hat Legal about this? They OKed distributing that
code along with JBoss, didn't they?
Kevin Kofler