On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 8:24 AM Florian Weimer fweimer@redhat.com wrote:

• Artur Frenszek-Iwicki:

...

Hi all,

I wanted to package the "cdecl" [0] program for Fedora. The upstream repository [1] does not contain any license file, instead describing the licensing situation as follows:

...

You may well be wondering what the status of cdecl is. So am I. It was twice posted to comp.sources.unix, but neither edition carried any mention of copyright. This version is derived from the second edition. I have no reason to believe there are any limitations on its use, and strongly believe it to be in the Public Domain.

Looking at other distributions, the program is available in Debian, with the package's license tag saying simply "Public Domain". Meanwhile, openSUSE uses a different fork [2] with some extra features, which has been relicensed to GPLv3.

The Google Groups Usenet archive suggests that the posting date was May 1988:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sources.unix/c/yzWbI4agBE0/m/ddqzmuiEidwJ

(As far as I understand it, dates are relevant in this case.)

Yes, I think so, that was shortly before the US entered into the Berne Convention. So at that time, if you published something in the US without a copyright notice it was in the public domain in the US (in the sense of "true public domain" as I've taken to calling it in the Fedora context) unless you registered the work within 5 years of publication. We can make an educated guess that the likelihood that anyone registered copyright on this code is vanishingly small. We also apply Fedora's conventions for how to deal with variances in copyright status across different jurisdictions (though of course that is somewhat unsatisfying). So I'm comfortable saying that the comp.os.unix code in cdecl that originates before ~1989 should be treated as "true public domain" (and in any case was likely intended to be completely unrestricted, as a matter of background cultural knowledge). That doesn't address the subsequent changes however. I would classify those as being somewhat implicitly under a public domain dedication by the various later authors, where the operative license text is that paragraph in the README file. So, this should be submitted as an issue at fedora-license-data as a proposal for inclusion in the LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain category. Though I think this is still not formally documented, we do not reflect "true public domain" in the License: field unless the *entire* RPM is "true public domain".

Artur Frenszek-Iwicki wrote:

So, I guess what I'm asking is:

1. Would packaging the original "most likely in Public Domain" program be okay in Fedora?

Yes, as addressed above.

2. Would packaging the GPLv3-relicensed fork be okay in Fedora?

Yes; I would assume that the SUSE fork is a fork of some of the earlier post-comp.os.unix versions (that is not clear from Artur's post) in which case it might end up properly represented as `GPL-3.0-or-later [say] AND LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain`.

Richard