Unclear copyright mention in appParsers/ParseDXF_Spline.py

[Agathe]

138:# by David F. Rogers. Copyright (C) 2000 David F. Rogers,
139-# All rights reserved.
--
205:# by David F. Rogers. Copyright (C) 2000 David F. Rogers,
206-# All rights reserved.
--
262:# by David F. Rogers. Copyright (C) 2000 David F. Rogers,
263-# All rights reserved.

It is not clear if this code that seems to be copied from a book can be redistributed under the name of the Flatcam authors in a MIT license.

Please clarify the copyright status of this file.

[Marius Stanciu]

Do you think I should remove this functionality from the software due of license infringement?
One of the requirements for FlatCAM was to maintain the licensing that’s the reason for keeping the MIT license. I admit, all I did is to make sure that attributions are made wherever some software blocks were borrowed from elsewhere.
Actually it could be an interesting discussion, let me know your thoughts on this!

[Agathe]

Hi,

After investigating this issue, I found that code can be copyrighted, but algorithms cannot. Since you rewrote this algorithm in Python, I think it is enough to ignore the copyright claim. I think the code should simply state “Inspired by book […]” instead of “All rights reserved” for a C code that is not even listed in the repository.

My two cents, I will add a comment in my debian/copyright file about this while you can remove it on your side if possible.

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Files:
 appParsers/ParseDXF_Spline.py
 2014-2019 Juan Pablo Caram
 2019 Marius Stanciu
License: Expat
Comment:
 The "All rights reserved" in the source code can be ignored, since it
 only applies to the verbatim C code of the mentioned book that is not even
 included in this file.

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