I have a question about your copyright for Kerberos

Marcus Watts mdw at umich.edu
Wed Oct 15 12:42:37 EDT 2008


Tom Yu <tlyu at MIT.EDU> writes:
> <mshbible at snu.ac.kr> writes:
> 
> > Also, I thank you very much if you send me the doument of copyright
> > of kerberos or know me the exact homepage about that.
> 
> The copyright and legal notices for each release are present in the
> README file for that release.  For the krb5-1.6.3 release, you may
> find them here:
> 
> http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/krb5-1.6/README-1.6.3.txt
> 
> It seems that we need to make this information more prominent.  As a
> general query to people on this list/newsgroup, which of the following
> changes are desirable?
> 
> * Remove most copyright notices from README, and place in a separate
>   COPYRIGHT file at the top level of distributions.
> 
> * Add links to README file of each release on the downloads page.
> 
> * Create a web page that contains the main MIT Kerberos copyright
>   notice, with a link to the README or COPYRIGHT file (whichever we
>   end up with) of the current release for copyright details including
>   the full text of licenses from contributors.

I think most people asking this are probably used to the GPL "LICENSE"
concept.  Putting a LICENSE file at the top of the distribution,
and creating links at various obvious parts of the download process
in imitation of common GPL projects pointing to the "license" may best
answer the expectations of these people.  Crafting the language for this
"license" should be an entertaining exercise.  Assuming all the bits of
MIT kerberos have BSD compatible licensing, concatenating the full text
of that licensing will be of limited value.  If there are parts that
have more restrictive licensing, that should certainly be mentioned.

The person who posted this particular question is I think not actually
asking about "copyright" proper, despite his subject line.  He seems
to be asking mostly about US export restrictions, which really has
nothing to do with copyright or licensing per se.  Putting that in a
README file is probably less useful than keeping this on a web page and
clearly identifying it as a "distribution" responsibility and not as a
"licensing" restriction.

				-Marcus Watts



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