Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by xxpor on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @09:39PM (#19316019)

Why do they have a LICENCE file with the Apache Licence in it? As a work of the federal government this is public domain by definition, isn't it?

edit: Oh, outside contributors of course retain their own copyright. That's what's licenced.

https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/blob/master...

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Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by vharuck on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @01:07PM (#19321056)

A common work-around is for a federal agency to hire a contractor to write software and require the copyright be transferred as part of the contract. The federal government can hold copyrights, so it's legally kosher.

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Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by paxys on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @11:59PM (#19316499)

They can also enforce copyright in other countries.

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Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by pbhjpbhj on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @04:58AM (#19317678)

Can they? How's that work, surely a resident in USA could take the work to the other country and make it available, if they can't then it wasn't public domain in the first place?

Can you point me to any caselaw/ analysis please?

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Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by MileyCyrax on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:59AM (#19318521)

I don't quite get it either, but one of their documentation files seems to imply that they can:

>In countries where copyright protection is available (which does not include the U.S.), contributions made by U.S. Federal Government employees are released under the License. Merged contributions from private contributors are released under the License.

https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/blob/master...

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Re:Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool by webninja on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @11:38PM (#19325530)

Guns

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