[sane-devel] New Backend newbie question

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 07:32:05AM -0500, Sunil William Savkar wrote:
> As a lawyer, I am unsure there is an issue here with integrating the
> Visioneer back-end, since if it indeed has been released to the public
> with open ownership (i.e. no strict license rights and thus if anything
> a broad license akin to ownership), then you could make some
> modifications to it and as long as there is authorship acknowledgement,
> your modified back-end can be included with the GPL.
>
> IN essence the underlying code is public w/ a non-GPL license, but the
> code + changes would be under GPL.  If someone wants non-GPL code at
> that point, they would have to grab the originally released Visioneer
> code.

All this is only valid if Visioneer explicitely states that they allow
this usage of the code, that is, modifying and relicensing is allowed.
If they just put it on their webserver or send it by email without any
statement, it can be used but not copied, modified or published. At
least that's the law in my country (IANAL).

So where is the original code from? Is there a link on the Visioneer
website? Or did the backend maintainer get the code from Visioneer?
What did they write literally when they published the code? 

Bye,
  Henning