mini-httpd NCSA license

[Alexandru Mihail]

Dear debian-legal,
I would like to better sum up my earlier question as follows:
I'm in the process of adopting the mini-httpd package.
mini-httpd contains early portions of code commited by Rob
McCool which seem to originate from NCSA httpd. (License: https://web.archive.org/web/20060830015540/http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs-1.5/Copyright.html)
There is no mention of this in our package's copyright file. How do we proceed to clarify this situation? (DFSG ?)
apache2 might be in the very same situation.
Kind regards,
Alexandru Mihail

[Richard Laager]

On 2023-07-02 16:43, Alexandru Mihail wrote:
> mini-httpd contains early portions of code commited by Rob
> McCool which seem to originate from NCSA httpd.

Just htpasswd.c (which is what I get when searching for Rob McCool), or
something else?

> How do we proceed to clarify this situation?

Figure out (from the history of the code, etc.) if that license applies.

Looking into this a bit, I found this repository (which I am _assuming_,
but have not verified, is a faithful import of NCSA httpd):
https://github.com/TooDumbForAName/ncsa-httpd/

I definitely see some code from mini-httpd's htpasswd.c in
cgi-src/util.c in the HEAD of that repository above.

Looking at git blame on that, it came from auth/htpasswd.c in httpd 1.1:
https://github.com/TooDumbForAName/ncsa-httpd/commit/9572b626b7f10ab57e4715b3f3ff41b3f0696684#diff-7c5a48b0225b3fd1048000f4dfe2c4d9f56faa29f74876ff724384244d6d099d

So that seems to be the original source of the code in question.

In that same version, the top-level README says:

----
This code is in the public domain. Specifically, we give to the public
domain all rights for future licensing of the source code, all resale
rights, and all publishing rights.

We ask, but do not require, that the following message be included in
all derived works:

Portions developed at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS GIVES NO WARRANTY, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED,
FOR THE SOFTWARE AND/OR DOCUMENTATION PROVIDED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT
LIMITATION, WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY AND WARRANTY OF FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
----

--
Richard