[Fedora-legal-list] NIST "license"

Re: the recent speech recognition thread on Fedora-devel, I am looking at packaging up a few tools from http://www.nist.gov/speech/tools/, SPHERE in particular. However, the distribution contains no mention of a license. A query about this was answered with a pointer to this page: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/disclaim.htm which says, "These World Wide Web pages are provided as a public service by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). With the exception of material marked as copyrighted, information presented on these pages is considered public information and may be distributed or copied. Use of appropriate byline/photo/image credits is requested." The SPHERE source distribution contains a directory, src/lib/sp, which does contain code with copyright and license statements. However, this is code that was written outside of NIST and appears to be released under a variety of open source licenses. I will do a thorough audit of that directory before proceeding. Assuming that audit turns up no problems, what do you think of NIST's statement above? Since the code they wrote contains no copyright statements, are they declaring it public domain? I can ask for more information if necessary, but I'd appreciate a hand with crafting the questions if so. I hope this doesn't turn into the conversation I had with a prominent computer scientist a couple of years ago. He distributes some excellent software with no clear license. We had a conversation that went something like this. Me: "Under what license are you distributing this software?" Him: "Argh! I hate it when people ask me that! I'm just doing research and making the results of my research available to the public!" Me: "Yes, but the public doesn't know what they are allowed to do with your software. That's what the license spells out." Him: "They can do whatever they want with it. That's why I put it on a web page!" Me: "Great, would you mind just writing that in a license file and including it with the software?" Him: "I haven't got time for this nonsense. If you find the software useful, then use it. If not, don't use it!" [Conversation then goes in circles for the next 5 minutes until me gives up.] -- Jerry James http://loganjerry.googlepages.com/ http://jjames.fedorapeople.org/