Re: [chrony-users] chronyd C&M protocol licensing

[Brad Hards <bradh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, 3 January 2022 5:41:31 PM AEDT Bill Unruh wrote:
> Well, if you want to be sure, do like Phoenix did with the IBM bios for the
> PC. You get one person/team to write out the specification from the source
> code for exactly what the data strucures, and queries are. Then you get
> another person team which has never seen the code, only the apecification,
> and inpliments the program from that, being very careful to document what
> was done to ensure that they never saw the source code.
Yes.  That is one option.
> You cannot do that yourself, unless you can convince a court that you
> sffered a bought of total amnesia between wrting the specification and
> writing the code. Otherwise  believe the presumption would be that what you
> write would be a derived work.
I don't think it is that clear, but I accept that as a defensible position.

> Alternatively, you can get a special licence from the copyright holder to do
> what you want. Exactly who the copyright holder would be for chrony is
> unclear as a number of people have worked on it and contributed to it.
I don't know how to interpret this statement. Is it "friendly advice from 
another user", or are you speaking on behalf of the project? 
 
> Thirdly you could do as you like and hope  none of the copyright  holders
> sue you.
This is an option, but not one I am comfortable with. I had hoped it was 
obvious that I was acknowledging the license. If I did not want to respect 
licenses, I wouldn't have asked the question.
 
> It is unclear to me which provision of GPL2 you want to violate. Do you want
> to release it as prprietary code, and sue anyone who copies it? Do you want
> to allow others to do that?
I find this a bit offensive. I do not want to violate the license. I am trying 
to make open source software (as noted in my original email), and I'd like to 
make it as widely useful as possible. As a Java library, that implies Apache 
licensing.

Either my code is a derived work of chrony and it has to be GPL v2 (because 
Clause 2), or it isn't, and I can provide it under my choice of license. I'd 
like the maintainers' advice.

> Note that I am  not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
OK. Thanks.

Brad





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