[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Alan DuBoff]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2008, Rick Moen wrote:

>> The NSA licenses their code in the public domain, with no copyrights
>> on it. I like that style myself.
>
> No, they do _not_.

Thanks for correcting me Rick, I guess your right. I figured 
that since there was a file inside the tarball called LICENSE 
which stated at the top of the file:

"This library (libselinux) is public domain software, i.e. not 
copyrighted."

That this code was licensed in the public domain, with no 
copyrights. Obviously my bad.:-/

I guess it is not ok to assume that a file called LICENSE would 
be the actual license for the sources in the actual tarball.

The NSA does have a disclaimer on the site:

"All source code found on this site is released under the same 
terms and conditions as the original sources. For example, the 
patches to the Linux kernel, patches to many existing utilities, 
and some of the new programs available here are released under 
the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License 
(GPL). Please refer to the source code for specific license 
information."

But in the case of the sources I am interested in, they are not 
licensed by any other license. There is one file in the entire 
tarball which is licensed under GPLv2, it is a utility written 
by James Morris of Red Hat. AFAICT, all of the other code is 
covered under the LICENSE file itself. I did go through every 
single file in the tarball, makefiles, text files, READMEs, 
etc...

I wonder why they would introduce such ambiguity if in fact they 
don't license the code as stated?

--

Alan DuBoff - Software Orchestration