On 04/10/12 13:47, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:

Hi,

I am preparing sbcl from devel:languages:misc project for Factory submission and I am not sure if the package should be BSD-2Clause or public domain or maybe a SUSE vaiant of these.

The web page of the sbcl http://www.sbcl.org/history.html> describes itself as follows """ SBCL is derived from CMU CL, and carries the same licensing terms, a mixture of BSD-style (for a few subsystems) and public domain (for the rest of the system).

Some of the files in CMU CL have a BSD-style license requiring that credit be given to the institutions which owned the copyright to the original versions: Xerox, Inc., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Symbolics, Inc., and Gerd Moellmann. For these files, SBCL necessarily uses the same BSD-style license as CMU CL did.

The rest of the files in SBCL (as in CMU CL) are in the public domain. The boilerplate at the beginning of SBCL source files looks like this:

;;;; This software is part of the SBCL system. See the README file for ;;;; more information. ;;;; ;;;; This software is derived from the CMU CL system, which was ;;;; written at Carnegie Mellon University and released into the ;;;; public domain. The software is in the public domain and is ;;;; provided with absolutely no warranty. See the COPYING and CREDITS ;;;; files for more information.

"""" The COPYING file at is similar to the above <http://sbcl.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=sbcl/sbcl.git;a=blob_plain;f=COPYING;hb=HEAD>

Guidance will be very much appreciated

The text of the COPYING file referenced above is: Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is free software, and comes with absolutely no warranty. SBCL is derived from CMU CL, which was released into the public domain, subject only to the BSD-style "free, but credit must be given and copyright notices must be retained" licenses in the LOOP macro (from MIT and Symbolics) and in the PCL implementation of CLOS (from Xerox). After CMU CL was released into the public domain, it was maintained by volunteers, who continued the tradition of releasing their work into the public domain. All changes to SBCL since the fork from CMU CL have been released into the public domain in jurisdictions where this is possible, or under the FreeBSD licence where not. Thus, there are no known obstacles to copying, using, and modifying SBCL freely, as long as copyright notices of MIT, Symbolics, Xerox and Gerd Moellmann are retained. There seems to be confusion over the meaning of public domain here. At least in the US copyright system, public domain means that the copyright is not owned by anybody - it is in the commons. As such, there cannot be a license (a license would imply somebody is granting rights - and for somebody to grant rights, there has to be an owner). Thus, it is probably more accurate to state that public domain is the absence of a license rather than saying public domain is a liberal license. Because of the confusion of the terms above, I'm not sure what is meant by "After CMU CL was released into the public domain". If it does mean that copyright was disclaimed, then the SUSE-Public-Domain tag is correct - not just for the original software but also for the subsequent changes, which also appear to have been released into the public domain. I can take a more detailed look at this if you submit the package to Factory. For the meantime use SUSE-Public-Domain in the spec file. Please do reference this post to opensuse-bar in your submit request comment, though. Hope this helps, Ciaran

Thanks Togan

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