Re: [Groff] Unix Research Editions 8, 9, and 10 Available.

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Ralph,

Ralph Corderoy wrote on Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 02:31:24PM +0100:

> Research Unix Editions 8, 9, and 10 will no longer have copyright
> asserted over them.

While that vaguely resembles the wording of the original announcement,
in this form, it is a grossly misleading statement.

For one thing, Alcatel-Lucent explicity says that they do "not
relinquish any intellectual property rights".  That includes
Copyright, so they clearly and explicitly retain ownership of their
Copyright.  In stark contrast to that very clear and unambiguous
statement, they do not explicitly say that they grant any permissions;
the word "permit" does not occur at all in the document.  Even
worse, the crucial sentence is grammatically incorrect and does not
contain any predicate.  At least one word is obviously missing.  If
that missing word is intended to be something like "guarantees" or
"promises" or "officially states its legally binding, irrevocable
intent", the statement might be somewhat useful; but if the missing
word is intended to be somelike like "plans" or "considers" or
"hopes", then it is rather useless and potentially a trap.

Besides, while they fail to explicitly grant any rights whatsoever,
they do explicitly say that they do not grant "any rights for
commercial purposes" - which is potentially another trap: For
example, if somebody includes parts of this code into a compilation
that is distributed non-commercially, suddenly parts of that
compilation can no longer be used commercially, which users might
not expect, potentially dragging unsuspecting end users into trouble.

> https://www.spinellis.gr/cgi-bin/comment.pl?date=20170328 says they
> contain, amongst other things, "graphics typesetting tools" so perhaps
> there's something of interest to today's troff users in them.

Something interesting, maybe; but given the vagueness of the statement,
doing anything with it other than looking at it for historical interest
seems fraught with multiple risks to me.

In particular, i don't think including code into groff that cannot
be used for commercial purposes and that does not have a clear and
unambiguous license would be a bad idea.

Yours,
  Ingo