Juliet tasks do not have a license

[MartinSpiessl]

The tasks in the folder c/Juliet_Test do not have a license. The LICENSE.txt simply states:

This software is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain. NIST assumes no responsibility whatsoever for its use by other parties, and makes no guaranties, expressed or implied, about its quality, reliability, or any other characteristic.

This can lead to legal problems. One particular pops into my mind: it does not exclude the authors/publishers of this repository from liabilities(!).

As I see it, since the tasks were modified, e.g. to contain LDV-specific code, they have to be seen as derived work. As such, I think the authors can indeed put a license like Apache-2.0 there.

Disclaimer: I am not a legal expert, so everything I just wrote could be wrong.

[PhilippWendler]

The real problem is that in many jurisdictions, the above statement is void because the concept of "public domain" does not exist. This means that in these jurisdictions, no permission to do anything at all with these files is available, and any use, redistribution, etc. is a copyright infringement. This is for example the case in Europe (if not in all of Europe then at least in most of it).

For example, the open-source initiative says that "an open source user or developer cannot safely include public domain source code in a project" (emphasis in original), and this is basically what we are doing here.

Modifications are even more difficult: Now we have (at least) two authors who contributed and did not legally grant permission to use, redistribute etc. in affected jurisdictions. And no, although the modifiers could license their modifications under a license they choose, they cannot attach a license to the original parts of the code if we are talking about a jurisdiction where public domain does not exist.

[MartinSpiessl]

Full version of the statement from Simon Phipps that you quoted:

That’s not a legal opinion (I’m not a lawyer so only entitled to layman’s opinions) but rather an observation that an open source user or developer cannot safely include public domain source code in a project.

I disagree in some minor points of your answer, but I guess we both agree in the essence:
unless we have legal advice telling us otherwise, we cannot use the Juliet tasks and should not have merged them in the first place.

We could ask the NIST to explicitly declare them as CC0, only then it would be clear that we can use them (provided the second authors add a license for their derivative work).

[PhilippWendler]

This is resolved now, the relevant NIST webpage now declares

This software is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain. NIST assumes no responsibility whatsoever for its use by other parties, and makes no guaranties, expressed or implied, about its quality, reliability, or any other characteristic.

Pursuant to 17 USC 105, Juliet Test Suite for Java version 1.3 is not subject to copyright protection in the United States. To the extent NIST may claim Foreign Rights in Juliet Test Suite for Java version 1.3, the Test Suite is being made available to you under the CC0 1.0 Public Domain License.

I will add a PR that adds this information to the files.