Re: [gNewSense-users] Yet another Licensing question

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr  4, 2008, Luis Alberto Guzmán García <address@hidden> wrote:

>  Copyright 1993 United States Government as represented by the Director,
> National Security Agency. This software may only be used and distributed
> according to the terms of the GNU General Public License as modified by
> SRC, incorporated herein by reference.

> I found this in linux-2-6-24-12-22/drivers/net/82596.c
> The part
> the terms of the GNU General Public License as modified by SRC

> How come?
> A license modified?

I understand it means the modified code, not the modified license.

As in, the original code, developed by the United States Government,
is in the public domain, i.e., not subject to copyright law, such that
nobody can be stopped, by powers granted by copyright law, from
modifying or distributing the original program under whatever terms
they like.

So, SRC (probably Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research
Center, before DEC was bought by Compaq, later bought by HP) modified
the public domain code and released the modified version under the
GPL.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  address@hidden, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   address@hidden, gcc.gnu.org}