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James-E-A / pypqc

Attempt to expose Wiggers and Stebila's PQClean via Python CFFI
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Resolve ambiguous "seedexpander" license #2

Closed James-E-A closed 10 months ago

James-E-A commented 10 months ago

That's just weird. It looks like the author was employed by the Federal government via NIST at the time he wrote the code, and it was apparently written in the course of his official duties, and the name in the "copyright" statement has (Fed) added like a weird qualifier — meaning his person acting as a federal employee? (I've never seen something like that before; it's anyone's guess.) If so, that would make the code not copyrightable!:

This software was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology by employees of the Federal Government in the course of their official duties. Pursuant to title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code this software is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain.

Bah...

James-E-A commented 10 months ago

Just went straight to the horse's mouth, anyway; we'll see if anything interesting happens as a result

To: Lawrence Bassham (NIST)
Sent: January 9, 2024 2:55 PM CST
Subject: Question about code from NIST PQC

Mr. Bassham,

I have a question about the "seedexpander" code you wrote in 2017 which was used in the NIST post-quantum cryptography competition.

I see it's been marked with a copyright under your name. But was that code written in the course of your official duties with NIST, which would make it not copyrightable, but automatically in the public domain?

I'm currently in the process of publishing Python bindings for the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardized algorithms, and wanted to appropriately name the license of all included 3rd party library code in the documentation. But I ran across a bit of a hiccup when it came to that file and its strange copyright statement, so I thought I'd just ask the reported author directly.

Thanks,
…

James-E-A commented 10 months ago

Looks like the copyright statement was really just erroneous, injected by his tooling:

From: Lawrence Bassham (NIST)
Sent: January 9, 2024 3:04 PM CST
Subject: Re: Question about code from NIST PQC

That's something that Xcode puts in automatically. Feel free to copy and use.

James-E-A commented 9 months ago

*and for good measure, Mr. Verschoor releases his changes to that file, too:

From: Sebastian Verschoor
Sent: January 11, 2024 8:42:45 AM CST
Subject: Re: [External] Re: Question about code from NIST PQC

Hi James,

Public domain is fine :)

Thanks for asking,