🚀 go-pugleaf

lfk@athena.mit.edu (Lee F Kolakowski) writes:

>2) I see the RCS is now under the GPL. I have ported RCS to DOS, and
>it works very well. But, I have a question about the rights of MKS
>(Mortice Kern Systems) who arranged with W. Titchy to port RCS to DOS
>and sell it (for $259 or there abouts). I would like to post the code
>to the PC binaries group along with binaries. This may be looked badly
>upon by the MKS lawyers. What is the status of the RCS code. Is it
>truely unencumbered by prior arrangements of the authors?

While I don't know the situation with RCS, I can tell true stories
about an analogous program, spice.  Spice is some sort of CAE tool.
It was written at a university and distributed under fairly open
copyright.

Many vendors picked up the spice code, enhanced it to one degree or
another, and began selling it.  Is this legal?  In the case of spice,
yes.  The spice code did not prohibit any particular type of reuse,
so the vendor was perfectly capable of doing as they please.

But the vendor copywrote his version of spice!  Was that legal?

Sure.  The vendor was taking a piece of work, making a derivative
work, and copywriting that derivative work.  This copyright of a
derivative work in no way invalidated the original copyright, and
in no way prevents other vendors from copyrighting their own
derivative version.  Thus we have multiple versions of spice out
there.

My guess is that some earlier version of RCS was copyright by
Tichy and not copylefted.  As such, Tichy still owns that version
and can do what he pleases with it.

As for the MKS lawyers -- if I were you, I'd post.