On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 12:12:37PM +0200, Pieter Verberne wrote:
> > > 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.
> That's good!
>
> > 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.
That is exactly the thing we want to prevent. We create source code
and want our names to remain in the source. We are proud of what we
have created. We are proud others find it useful and let them use our
source code in the way they want to, as long as we are still
recognized as authors according to copyright law. So we want our names
to remain in the files, and not just as "common knowledge", which is
vague and often wrong.
> > 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.
>
> > > 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.
IIRC == If I remember correctly.
Also, something in my memory tells me the concept of public domain is
not as well defined and internationally coherent as copyright law, but
my memory might be playing tricks with me.
-Otto
