[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Legal Problem: md5 implementation

[Enrico Scholz]

"Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> writes:

>> It should be enough to remove this license text (which is allowed since
>> 2000) to make it GPL compatible.  Or, to make it legally perfect, remove
>> the old code, take recent version of RFC 1321, copy reference code from
>> it and remove the license text.
>
> Only RSA can remove the license text,

no; everybody can remove it because you can do everything what you want
to do with the code since 2000.


> The license text in the code itself trumps all.

Why? The text was written 1992 which was before the dual licensing to
public domain in 2000.


> It trumps readmes and "global email proclamations". Now, if RSA released
> a new file upstream that was under a GPL compatible license, different
> story, but they have not.

Relicensing can heppen in different ways. A new version with changed
text can be released, or it can be given an explicit permission to use
it with another license.  Latter happened with the md5 source code in
2000.



Enrico