On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 10:14:06AM +0200, Pieter Verberne wrote:
> On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 03:38:13AM +0530, debian developer wrote:
> > ["bsd vs. GPL"]
>
> Sorry for 'stealing' this thread but I'm not sure if I should make a new
> thread for this.
>
> I'm wondering what OpenBSD people think about BSD (-like) licenses
> versus public domain.
>
> What does the ISC license actually do?
> It keeps your copyright (so you can change the license later, but I
> guess you won't),
> it says: do with it whatever you want,
> it says: don't blame me for anything.
>
> Pulic domain also says "do with it whatever you like". I really don't
> know about the importance of the disclaimer. Maybe it depends on
> the country you live in. I'm a minimalist is some respects, and I think
> you should not put anything in a license file that is not necessary:
> [quote]
> ...we favor licenses that are both clear and concise and, most
> importantly, that don't require a lawyer to interpret.
> --todd ( http://9fans.net/archive/2003/06/282 )
> [/quote]
>
> If you put anything in public domain, you'll give up your copyright. So
> the next person te distribute your software is allowed to remove your
> name from the credits list. I can imagine this sounds like a problem for
> some man. But hey, who wrote Qmail? No-one will forget.
If you look at the tree, you'll see that some newly created files are
public domain. But in general, we choose to remain known as author.
That is our privilege for the files we created or modified
extensively. Whatever you choose to do with things you publish is your
decision.
And you completely forget that a lot of the work done in the tree is
small changes to existing, BSD licensed files originally authored by
people not working in the tree anymore. We cannot change the license
of these files for obvious reasons.
> BTW, how many times is the BSD license in the source repository? I think
> it is a filthiness of "$ head [sourcefile]".
IIRC copyright law requires the license to be put in every source
file.
-Otto
