[Bug 566750] Review Request: MUMPS - A MUltifrontal Massively Parallel sparse direct Solver

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566750

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

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--- Comment #3 from Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> 2010-02-25 13:19:02 EST ---
I love citing Wikipedia here, but it is reasonably thorough:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_copyright_law

Basically, the logic is that in France, there is the concept of Moral Rights,
which copyright holders cannot waive. That makes it effectively impossible for
anyone (living) in France to place their works into the Public Domain. They
could place an extremely permissive license on it, but not abandon copyright
entirely.

On this specific package, I asked Red Hat Legal for advice, and they noted that
on the surface, it looks like the result of a rather formal project involving
many research institutions, and that they were skeptical whether these
institutions actually authorized placement of the original software into the
public domain in any sense. They would need to see some solid documentation of
this (and no, the Ubuntu/Debian copyright file doesn't count) to back this up.
Also, the Ubuntu/Debian copyright notice seems to suggest that in the
2000s there were further modifications by other institutions - where's
the documentation that, say, INRIA authorized its changes to be in the
public domain? 

I need to see a lot more documentation around the licensing of this software
before we can even think about lifting the FE-Legal block. I'd be happy to talk
to upstream about this if they think they can shed some light here.

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