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Re: copyright problem with install-sh, request for clean-room rewrite


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: copyright problem with install-sh, request for clean-room rewrite
Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2018 15:20:14 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.9.1

On 09/03/2018 10:35 AM, Thomas Dickey wrote:
On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 09:13:13AM -0500, Eric Blake wrote:
...
Note that the most recent version of 'install-sh' as installed by Automake
states:
# Copyright (C) 1994 X Consortium

looking at my collection of untarred X sources, there's an issue with that:

Thanks for digging up more history.



With all that, the available information shows that someone "fixed" things
in the early 2000s by adding a copyright date to address the derived work.

Git blame points to Automake commit 7bb3bbe6e:

commit 7bb3bbe6e2560604a2f925fec6ff7b4afd74e180
Author: Alexandre Duret-Lutz <address@hidden>
Date:   Fri May 9 17:58:21 2003 +0000

    * lib/install-sh: Update copyright notice and license to that of
    X11R6.  This removes an advertising clause reported as Debian bug
    #191717.

http://bugs.debian.org/191717 is an interesting read, pointing out that versions of automake prior to that point had:

-# Copyright 1991 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
-# (FSF changes in the public domain.)
[with an advertising clause]

before what now reads as:

+# Copyright (C) 1994 X Consortium
[with no advertising clause]

In turn, that copyright line first appeared in commit 4314bddf in Jul 1996, prior to which point it was indeed shipped without a copyright line.


Perhaps autoconf's source repo has additional information.

Looking there, it has moved over time (from the top level, to config/install-sh, to now build-aux/config.sh). The initial commit there in 1994 indeed had no copyright (see commit 430e0b6), and the MIT copyright notice was added in Jul 1996 (commit ce6c1f20) - looks like autoconf and automake were kept relatively close in sync at that time, and only later with commit 383913b4 in Sep 1998 did autoconf start syncing install-sh from a different location rather than maintaining it in parallel with automake.

As is, the copyright was apparently not applied by the owner of the file.


So the sentence in the autoconf manual was, at least at one point in history, correct about the file not carrying a copyright; but is now out of date based on what subsequent modifications have pulled in (although tracking actual copyright may be a lot harder than just doing a clean-room rewrite).

--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org



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