Talk:Licence
From Java.Inquisition
I think that using the public domain instead of a recognised licence is not a good choice. It is possible that someone else could take your work, apply a different licence to it and then come back at you and restrict your ability to use your own original creation. This may be unlikely, but why run the risk? MIT, Artistic, BSD, Mozilla (NPL) check em out. I can see you don't want to go down the GPL path, which is fine but I think you can be more certain of achieving your goals with one of the other formal licences.
Actually come to think of it I would be exactly the kind of person who could have a motivation to take your work, claim it for my own and then restrict what you do with it (I have my own web based exam engine and bank of SCJP 1.5 questions). Quick quick, repent :)
Marcus
- And if I don't repent? Presumably I get the comfy chair? ;-) (Sorry, more Monty Python references...) IANAL, of course, but I believe the situation is as follows: I agree that it's possible that someone could fork my work and apply a license, but that would only stop me from using their derived version. I (and everyone else) could still use and distribute the public domain version. Wikipedia's article on the public domain discusses this here, see the stuff on "Nimmer", where they quote a US court case: "it is axiomatic that material in the public domain is not protected by copyright, even when incorporated into a copyrighted work". According to that, you can always extract PD stuff directly from a non-free derivitive, at least under US law.
- A small advantage of PD is that a reuser can take any snippet of code they like and use it without having to worry about fulfilling conditions (like sticking an extra LICENSE file in their work).
- I do like the GPL, by the way, and copyleft is a powerful strategy. What concerns me about it is incompatibility amongst free licenses. That is, if I have two bits of code that are under different free licenses, they should be able to be mixed freely. Copyleft licenses, and particularly the GPL, have a tendency to make this difficult in certain situations, and I believe that makes them less free. Matt 10:46, 6 October 2006 (BST)
I think I'll just pop over to Wikipedia and change it to my own interpretation of PD :)... If that is the position you might be OK, but it is certainly not my previous understanding. Perhaps some searches within GNU.org for argments about PD might help. I'll take a look tonight at the book I have on licences (the O'Reily one) and see if there is any commentry on the public domain. I have a feeling that the concept of public domain isn't generally enshrined in or protected by law. The other issue is that the US jurisdiction is a tiny target for the long term use of the project (several Billion Indians and Chinse about to become SCJP etc) and you would be better off with a license that has a chance of protecting the product in the longer term by being explicit about the rights and obligations.
- I had a quick Google through gnu.org, but the web pages I found endorse PD as a way to do free software (GNU even includes PD software): http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ and http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CombinePublicDomainWithGPL (although, of course, they strongly recommend copyleft licensing instead).
- They advise that "If a file has been explicitly placed in the public domain, then instead of a copyright notice, it should have a notice saying explicitly that it is in the public domain." GNU + FSF have a reputation for being fairly strict about (their views on) freedom, so I think they're trustworthy on this. Creative Commons also have an option for dedications into the public domain.
- I agree that we have to worry about places outside the US (a certain little island off the coast of France comes to mind, for a start), but from what I've heard, the concerns with public domain in other jurisdictions is not that someone can fork and take away the author's rights to his own work, but rather that the author simply cannot give away certain "moral rights", therefore freedom isn't guaranteed to others (or so some people argue). To cover that, I could add a statement to the PD declaration to say something along the lines of, "In case PD is not legally possible, I irrevocably release all rights to it, allowing it to be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited in any way by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with or without attribution of the author, as if in the public domain." That's essentially a conditional license to cover the eventuality that the very concept of public domain is not applicable (if, say, it didn't exist in China or India). It's an approach people take on Wikipedia. Matt 14:30, 6 October 2006 (BST)
I surrender, and I'll stop taking up your time that could be spent actually coding. Can we have a bit of a bio page on you?
