[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alan DuBoff (aland at softorchestra.com):

> 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.:-/

No worries.

At the risk of pedantry, a licence is, by definition, a grant of
permission.  No grant of permission is necessary (or useful) for a work
that by law lacks the attribute of an ownership title.  The statement
you cited is intended as a public notice -- since unlike, say, a
500-year-old image by Leonardo di Vinci, it's not intuitively obvious
that NSA's software, or, say, the Veteran Administration's VistA[1], is
public domain.

Ergo, the quoted statement is by definition not a licence, regardless of
the filename it's stored in.

> 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.

Well, in retrospect, it seems likely that they called the file "LICENSE"
because they knew that's where people would look.

> "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."

Now, _that_ sounds like a catch-all clause that acknowledges that there
is also code from non-Federal parties.

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

I'm not sure I know what you mean.  You seemed to be quoting them as
saying that the NSA-produced code is public domain (as per the statute I
cited), and that various other code elements are under their respective
licences.  Which is correct.