Well, I am not an expert in global law, however, you might just add a copyright notice to the effect that the entries in these files are (c) their individual authors. Because they contributed them explicitly to SLIME, there is at least an implicit license of use that follows the overall license of SLIME (e.g., FSF, or whatever), but even if SLIME were public domain, you could not assume that such a contribution would also be public domain, only that there is an implicit license to use in conjunction with the use of SLIME.
Subject to debate, that might be worded:
;; Entries in this file are Copyright (C) their individual authors, ;; attributed or otherwise. An implicit license to copy and use these ;; contributions in conjunction with SLIME is presumed under the terms of ;; the GPL, however, additional rights are reserved to the respective ;; authors.
Along with any additional needed legalese (express disclaimers of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose; inclusion of the GPL since I don't think it can simply be referenced as "GPL", which by the way, appears to be missing from the SLIME distro, and FSF already gives a sample license statement for how to talk about it.)
I think this would preserve the spirit of having made a contribution to SLIME (that is, an author would certainly have the expectation the work would be shared and used as SLIME is), and expressly acknowledges the implicit copyright on such works, without the suspect action of a declaration by a third party that the work is in the public domain (which if relied upon on the basis that the declaration was part of the distro, could cause a lot of legal problems down the road should one of the original authors or their heirs eventually step forward and make a claim).
B/R
Bradford W. Miller
-----Original Message----- From: mb@bese.it [mailto:mb@bese.it] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 7:30 PM To: Bradford W Miller Cc: slime-devel@common-lisp.net Subject: Re: [slime-devel] COPYRIGHT change - slime contributors please read this
Marco Baringer mb@bese.it writes:
what should i do for README and HACKING where there is no single author?
what i really meant to say here was: what should I do for those files which have no copyright notice in them?
The files in question are:
swank-ecl.lisp (juan jose garcia is ok with putting this file into the public domain) doc/Makefile HACKING NEWS PROBLEMS README