On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 12:12:37PM +0200, Pieter Verberne wrote: > > 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. > Uhm.. "to remain known as author": sounds vague to me. (maybe because > of my english) . However, when you put anything in public domain, you > will stay recognized as the (orginal) author. (in most cases). Look at > qmail, or public domain Korn shell. There only may by a chance that > some autors names are 'lost' sometimes (in redistributions) because > of the lack of obligation to mention the authors.
The only section of copyright that isn't surrendered by the ISC license (also often mistakenly called the BSD) is authorship. As an example, I like to give away my code for people to study and play with. The only thing I "demand" is credit for that piece of code. The reason I do not abandon that right is because at some point in my life I might need to use my open source work as a resume or as a reference. On the other hand I do not like to be coerced into anything. Especially under the cloak of charity. The GPL protects the user from the author and in my world that is backwards. > > > 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. > Well, I not really forget. I was just talking about new written code. The ISC license is the license of choice for newly written OpenBSD code. There are some others that are compatible enough that are allowed as well. > > > > 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. > > Uhm, dunno what IIRC is.. But wouldn't it be just great to put anything > like this in a file's header? : > # This file is in public domain > or even better: > # public domain > > So IIRC requires the full license? That's a shame, it would be nicer to > use the license's name only.A All files require a copyright and license notice. There have been many examples where files were borrowed from other places and then people lost track as to where it came from. Not having a license makes that file 100% copyrighted. If a file has no license one is NOT allowed to: * copy * modify * distribute So in an open source project that is really really bad.
