bug#296: Your copyright on 'stat'

  Hello Grant;  I hope this message finds you in good health.  I'm a
  member of the lnx-bbc team and we're rather close to releasing.  We
  are making a concerted effort to be *certain* of all the licenses.

  Please forgive me if another member of the crew has already mailed 
  you and your answer is crossing path with my note in the mail routes.

  For the 'stat' program version 1.0.0d which you provide sources and a 
  Red Hat spec file for, you mention your copyright, but the spec file
  states "Public Domain".

  In the world of copyright Public Domain is a term of art usually 
  reserved for things whose creation was paid for by the public... 
  thus it is beyond the scope of the "N years of an author's lifetime"
  normally applied by default... or for people/companies who wish to 
  declare that their project belongs to the public, and not to
  themselves.  Before copyright law got stretched to cover the reach
  of a human lifespan instead of approx the same length as a patent,
  this is also the state a project graduates to when its term of
  protected copyright is over.   ... I am not a lawyer and this is
  completely a layman's view of the term ...

  ...but I have also heard people use the words "Public Domain" to
  mean a license which allows the public to use it freely, with some
  basic freedoms of derivitive works and lack of need to credit anyone
  implied.

  If you could mention which one you meant, and the terms your
  assumption means if you took the latter view, we can publish these
  and happily go onward.

  BTW, thanks for the cool software; lots of sysadmins I know find it
  very handy.  If you leave the bug-system in the cc: list when you
  reply, the rest of the team will get to see your answer right away.

  All the best to you

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         [email protected]
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - [email protected]
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