Adayapalam Appaiah Kumaraswamy wrote:
Also, the BSD fortune packages would be a welcome addition.
Red Hat deliberately dropped this, citing legal concerns.
I can see their point. Quoting a few lines from a book is (sweeping generalisation here) normally considered fair use, and acceptable.
Quoting an entire work, or something which could reasonably be considered to be an entire work, is copyright infringement. Quoting a large part of a work is also illegal.
Some of the "fortunes" in the BSD package are either poems or the lyrics to songs. Where these are under copyright, they should not be in the BSD fortune file.
Then, of course, Red Hat's distributions are sold under lots of different legal systems, with different theories about what is legal.[1] And the fortune file's attributions were not always accurate (or their quoting, either), making it non-trivial to check who really wrote that quote, and whether it was really OK to use.
And getting it wrong could mean that the *whole* distribution could be barred from being distributed until the offending quote was excised, new media burnt, new packages produced, the old recalled...
Red Hat didn't need the cost or the hassle for a marginal package.
As always, I Am Not A Lawyer...
James.
[1] For example, you'd think a translation produced in 1611 would be out of copyright, wouldn't you? But under English law, the King James Version of the Bible is Crown copyright in perpetuity, despite having been written in 1611. A suitably long quote from the Song of Songs could theoretically attract the attention of the Crown's patentee: the Cambridge University Press, I believe.
US Constitutional scholars: that's why the "for limited times" clause is there.
This is available from Fedora Extras. There was some discussion about the reasoning behind dropping the program from the distribution during the Phoebe beta testing period.
I enjoy the program, but one of the reasons was regarding some phrases within the fortunes offending some people. An example would be Science Fiction vs creationism. Some phrases do not bring to mind anthing offensive and seem innocent. To others, they may be interpreted as offensive.
Legal matters might have something to do with this. I believe the offensive nature of some fortunes and directing resources to other concerns was the major reason for dropping the program.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/phoebe-list/ and search for fortune there.
Jim
-- A hacker does for love what others would not do for money.
