From: Corey Jewett <ml@...>
Date: 2008-04-01T08:03:42+09:00
Subject: Re: About the license of gserver.rb being "freeware"?


On Mar 31, 2008, at 04:53 , XiaoLiang Liu wrote:
> Can anyone help me on this?
>
> I think Ruby development team should have investigated the license  
> issue
> before release the package.
>
> Thanks a lot.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/freeware.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/freeware

The term �freeware� has no clear accepted definition, but it is  
commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not  
modification (and their source code is not available). These packages  
are not free software, so please don't use �freeware� to refer to free  
software. -- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

IANAL. Freeware is different from public domain. Releasing something  
into the public domain means you abandon your copyright and therefore  
your ownership of the work. Freeware is a somewhat arbitrary license,  
but it generally implies that the author has given you all rights to  
use something. Modification and redistribution may or may not be  
questionable.

Unfortunately, given that the term freeware is so vague, your best bet  
is to either track down the original author. Perhaps you should  
contact matz directly and ask why it was committed since it appears he  
did the original checkin: http://svn.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/lib/gserver.rb?revision=4102&view=markup

Corey


> On 3/28/08, XiaoLiang Liu <liuxlsh@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I found that in Ruby package there's a file named gserver.rb, the  
>> license
>> of which is "freeware". I searched freeware licence on internet,  
>> but I
>> didn't find the content of the licence.
>>
>> Then I searched for the author of gserver, John W. Small, and found  
>> his
>> email address  jsmall@laser.net. But my mail to this address was  
>> returned
>> back by the mail server because there's no such an email address.
>>
>> So does anyone know about freeware licence, or does anyone know how  
>> to
>> contact John W. Small? Thanks a lot.
>>
>>
>> Here's the header of gserver.rb
>> --------------------------------------------------------------
>> #
>> # Copyright (C) 2001 John W. Small All Rights Reserved
>> #
>> # Author::        John W. Small
>> # Documentation:: Gavin Sinclair
>> # Licence::       Freeware.
>> #
>> # See the class GServer for documentation.
>> #
>>