[Firebird-devel] [2.1 RC2] Missing license for several files in builds/install/arch-specific/sinixz/

[Damyan I. <dm...@de...>]

Hi,

While preparing a summary of the license/copyrights of Firebird source
for usage in Debian ource package, I've encountered some files that have
the following:

# $Copyright:
# Copyright (C) Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG 1994 - 1998
# Copyright (C) Siemens AG 1998 1999
# Copyright (C) Fujitsu Siemens Computers GmbH 1999 - 2002
# All rights reserved

Taken literally (as a lawyer would do, I think), this means that the
file cannot be distributed, changed, or used in any way, because all
these rights belong to the copyright holders listed and there is no
explicit license mentioned.

Note that such a case is *not* covered by the "freeware rule" in
doc/license/README.license.usage.txt because there is explicit copyright
statements, but no license:
    5) Every non-binary file that exists in the CVS tree, should have a
       header section which describes the license this code is released
       under.  If a file contains no header, it means that this code is
       freeware and nobody owns the appropriate copyrights.

The files I've encountered with the problem are postinstall.in,
postremove.in and preinstall.in in the
builds/install/arch-specific/sinixz directory of the tarball.

This is not so important for me, as I can easily remove those files from
the Debian source package (sinixz is not part of Debian ports).

However, I think it is a problem to distribute these files in their
current state via SourceForge as noone but the copyright holders has
the right to do so.

HEAD is OK as Claudio removed the directory 6 weeks ago, B2_1_Release,
B3_0_Transition and older branches still have it (as well as the source
.tar.bz2 files on sourceforge).


Regards,
-- 
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