Re: [Savannah-hackers] Re: Logic Mazes Solver

[Shlomi Fish]

On Sat, 6 Apr 2002, Loic Dachary wrote:

> Shlomi Fish writes:
>  > On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Loic Dachary wrote:
>  >
>  > > Shlomi Fish writes:
>  > >
>  > >  > I know, I know. But I usually like to put something more meaningful 
> in the
>  > >  > license, than just a copyright notice. Something like:
>  > >
>  > >  Unless you have a strong legal background, trying to be creative
>  > > on the subject of copyright and license notices will only hurt you. If
>  > > you want your software to be Free Software, could you please apply
>  > > the X11 license as suggested ?
>  > >
>  >
>  > Hmppf. What's wrong with the Public Domain?
>
>       Although I prefer copyleft, I do acknowledge that "Public
> Domain" is a very acceptable form of Free Software. The X11 and
> Modified BSD license are "Public Domain" licenses. Why do you think
> they are not ?
>

I did not say they are not. AFAIK, however, Public Domain means the work
bears no copyright. I.e: anyone can stamp it with the copyright he
desires, and derive work from it. Or he can keep it under the public
domain. I think that with the MIT X11 license, you still need to keep the
work copyrighted, and an X11 one cannot be converted to the PD.

There was a time when my partner for a Technion project and I, decided to
dually license an original code we wrote under the MIT X11 license and the
GPL. The reason for that was that we coded a TCP/IP noise simulator for
the Linux kernel. Since it ran in the kernel and could do a lot of damage,
we decided that we don't want to risk someone blaming us for being the
writers of the otherwise Public Domain code. We dually licensed it under
the GPL because we were not sure that a code that does what we caused it
to do, could be anything except GPL. But since we originated the code and
it could be theoretically used for something else altogether in a
different context - we made it X11, too.

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

>       Cheers,
>
>

-- 


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Shlomi Fish        address@hidden
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He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.