Re: patch providing SHA-2 utilities

[David Madore]

> Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:
> > My understanding (although IANAL) is that when you assign copyright to
> > FSF, you, as original author, still retain the right to relicense your
> > code as you see fit for other uses without involving the FSF.  So the fact
> > that you are willing to relicense means that you can put your own SHA-2
> > implementation under LGPL as Simon desired (I'm sure someone else will
> > correct me if I am mis-speaking).

Well, I grant you the right to reuse under the LGPL any SHA-2 code
for which I can legally grant you that right.

On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 05:40:49AM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> This is my understanding as well.

What makes me suspicious of this understanding is that section 1(d) of
the copyright transfer I signed with the FSF states that

"FSF agrees to grant back to Developer, and does hereby grant,
non-exclusive royalty-free and non-cancellable rights to use the Works
(i.e., Developer's changes and/or enhancements, not the Program that
they enhance), as Developer sees fit; this grant back does not limit
FSF's rights and public rights acquired throught this agreement."

Now it seems to me that if your interpretation were correct (if I
could still relicense the code) the FSF would not need to expressly
grant me this right, and, in fact, they grant me the right to "use the
Works" but not to relicense them.

On the other hand, you can also decide that you don't care about the
legal subtleties because nobody is going to sue.  You could also
pretend that I licensed my code to you under the LGPL before I signed
the assignment.  As far as I'm concerned, all is fine.

> David, you wrote all of the changes, right?  If so, I think it would
> be sufficient if you would state that you release your stuff under the
> LGPL too.

I wrote all the changes w.r.t. SHA-1 code.  I did not write the SHA-1
itself, I don't know what its legal status is and I make no claims in
this respect.

-- 
     David A. Madore
    (address@hidden,
     http://www.madore.org/~david/ )