Judah Jacobson wrote:
Hi all,
As mentioned before, I'm putting together an editline package which will provide a subset of the APIs from the readline package, but be BSD-compatible since it links against libedit.
The licensing for the readline package itself is a little strange -- it's licensed under the GPL (because it links with libreadline), but there's no copyright holder information; and Readline.hsc from that package lists "Copyright: (c) unknown".
I'd like to put the Haskell editline package under BSD3, but most of the code will be copied verbatim from the readline package. How should this be attributed/copyrighted Disclaimer: IANAL.
Unfortunately you can't make copies without permission from the copyright holder, even if you can't trace them. So in this case you are not allowed to copy verbatim. However if, for technical or compatibility reasons there is only one possible way to write it (for instance the names and types of an API) then you can duplicate that. But you still can't copy the comments verbatim unless they are completely dictated by the code. Of course if we can track down the original author then you may be able to get some other permission from them. Paul.