> Just want a second opinion on this - I'm fairly sure we are clear to
> include a file with this notice on it, but thought I'd see if someone
> knew different.
Anything developed by any branch of the U.S. government itself is
automatically in the public domain. That is, no one has any proprietary
rights to it at all. This means we can do anything we want with it,
including modifying it (in legal terms: creating derived works) and
adding a GPL license for the modifications.
This is *not* true in general of software developed by a contractor
working for the U.S. government, by the way, nor is it true for some
other countries (e.g. in the U.K., it would be "crown copyright"). It
would also not be true if the code were derived from Symbolics code.
But in this case, it is very clear that the code is in the public
domain.
-s
> ;;;> Software developed by Bruce R. Miller
> ;;;> using Symbolics Common Lisp (system 425.111, ivory revision 4)
> ;;;> at NIST - Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory
> ;;;> a part of the U.S. Government; it is therefore not subject to
> ;;;> copyright.