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 =20
> 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 =93freeware=94 has no clear accepted definition, but it is =20
commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not =20
modification (and their source code is not available). These packages =20=

are not free software, so please don't use =93freeware=94 to refer to =
free =20
software. -- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

IANAL. Freeware is different from public domain. Releasing something =20
into the public domain means you abandon your copyright and therefore =20=

your ownership of the work. Freeware is a somewhat arbitrary license, =20=

but it generally implies that the author has given you all rights to =20
use something. Modification and redistribution may or may not be =20
questionable.

Unfortunately, given that the term freeware is so vague, your best bet =20=

is to either track down the original author. Perhaps you should =20
contact matz directly and ask why it was committed since it appears he =20=

did the original checkin: =
http://svn.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/trunk/lib/gserver.rb?revision=3D=
4102&view=3Dmarkup

Corey


> On 3/28/08, XiaoLiang Liu <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I found that in Ruby package there's a file named gserver.rb, the =20
>> license
>> of which is "freeware". I searched freeware licence on internet, =20
>> but I
>> didn't find the content of the licence.
>>
>> Then I searched for the author of gserver, John W. Small, and found =20=

>> his
>> email address  [e-mail]. But my mail to this address was =20
>> 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 =20=

>> 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.
>> #
>>