About the Documentation License

Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO
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# Appendix C. About the Documentation License

| A copy of the text of the edict was to be issued as law in every province and made known to the people of every nationality so they would be ready for that day.
| Esther 3:14 (NIV)

This document is Copyright (C) 1999-2000 David A. Wheeler. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the invariant sections being ``About the Author'', with no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover texts. A copy of the license is included below in Appendix D.

These terms do permit mirroring by other web sites, but be sure to do the following:

- make sure your mirrors automatically get upgrades from the master site,

- clearly show the location of the master site (http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs), with a hypertext link to the master site, and

- give me (David A. Wheeler) credit as the author.

The first two points primarily protect me from repeatedly hearing about obsolete bugs. I do not want to hear about bugs I fixed a year ago, just because you are not properly mirroring the document. By linking to the master site, users can check and see if your mirror is up-to-date. I'm sensitive to the problems of sites which have very strong security requirements and therefore cannot risk normal connections to the Internet; if that describes your situation, at least try to meet the other points and try to occasionally sneakernet updates into your environment.

By this license, you may modify the document, but you can't claim that what you didn't write is yours (i.e., plagiarism) nor can you pretend that a modified version is identical to the original work. Modifying the work does not transfer copyright of the entire work to you; this is not a ``public domain'' work in terms of copyright law. See the license in Appendix D for details. If you have questions about what the license allows, please contact me. In most cases, it's better if you send your changes to the master integrator (currently David A. Wheeler), so that your changes will be integrated with everyone else's changes into the master copy.

I am not a lawyer, nevertheless, it's my position as an author and software developer that any code fragments not explicitly marked otherwise are so small that their use fits under the ``fair use'' doctrine in copyright law. In other words, unless marked otherwise, you can use the code fragments without any restriction at all. Copyright law does not permit copyrighting absurdly small components of a work (e.g., ``I own all rights to B-flat and B-flat minor chords''), and the fragments not marked otherwise are of the same kind of minuscule size when compared to real programs. I've done my best to give credit for specific pieces of code written by others. Some of you may still be concerned about the legal status of this code, and I want make sure that it's clear that you can use this code in your software. Therefore, code fragments included directly in this document not otherwise marked have also been released by me under the terms of the ``MIT license'', to ensure you that there's no serious legal encumbrance:

      Source code in this book not otherwise identified is
      Copyright (c) 1999-2001 David A. Wheeler.

      Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
      obtaining a copy of the source code in this book not
      otherwise identified (the "Software"), to deal in the
      Software without restriction, including without limitation
      the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute,
      sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
      permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
      subject to the following conditions:

      The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
      included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

      THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
      EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
      WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
      PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
      IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
      LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
      WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
      ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE
      OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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Acknowledgements |  | GNU Free Documentation License