copyright and licenses review

[Don Hooper]

Patrice Dumas,

Julia Collins and I are University of Colorado employees stationed at NOAA,
a U.S. federal government agency.  Thus, we do our work on federal government
computers.  Thus, all of our work is in the public domain.  This was actually
tested several years back:  a colleague tried to assert a copyright to the
University's Regents for some code she had written, and lawyers explained
the situation as I have above.  I know I've shared this point with Brian Doty;
I may have mentioned it to Jennifer Adams of COLA as well.  I've no idea why
there is no notation to this effect in gasdf.c, gasdf.h, or gasdf_std_time.h.
In any case, it's the same as with wgrib.c, written by another person
affilliated with NOAA.  U.S. federal government stuff is public domain, period.
I'm quite certain I've told both Brian and Jennifer to do whatever they want
with the code I've contributed to the GrADS project.  I'm fairly certain all
of the other project participants had this in mind before they started, too.

-Hoop
> From owner-gradsusr at LIST.CINECA.IT  Wed Sep 21 01:56:23 2005
>
> Hi,
>
> I have checked all the files included in grads for their licence and copyright
> and I attach the result of my analysis. Hopefully this is a more
> acceptable way to deal with that issue... So please review and correct
> my mistakes. I have used as template doc/copyright_summary from the
> netpbm package.
>
> I only used the information present in the files to conduct that analysis,
> assuming that when there were multiple author and a copyright statement
> the authors had transfered their copyright to the copyright holder. For
> file without explicit copyright statements, but with author names if
> significant part of the code come from other people that didn't add their
> names, I obviously have missed them.
>
> My understanding of copyright law is that a file which is copyrighted but
> has no licence is under a non permissive licence (no right to modify or
> redistribute). And that the mention of an author is enough to have the file
> copyrighted by he author. However most files in grads without licence but
> with an author don't have a specific copyright statement, so it is
> possible that the intent of their author is not to release those files
> with such a restrictive licence, but instead that they think that the code
> can be shared in some way. At least Matthias Munnich for gxhpng.c, Mike
> Fiorino for gstmp.c and fgbds.c and Don Hooper for gasdf.c and gasdf.h
> are listening to this mailing list so you could clarify your licence, in
> case you are not satisfied with the default licence.
>
> The notice for wgrib is not in the grads code, but I followed the link from
> the download page to find it.
>
> --
> Pat