> At least partially, my confusion seems to be caused by the dichotomy of > the concepts of copyright and license. How do these relate to each other?
A license emerges out of the commercial domain is purely about commercial protections. A copyright comes from the "academic" domain is pure about protecting your "intellectual property", or non-physical creations (most from encroachment of the commercial domain, by the way). They are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but because of our bi-polar system the terms get used as synonyms . In a way they are not related and it all depends on what court would listen to the case. In a German court, you would almost certainly be tried under the commercial framework, In the US, in theory (and this is where it must be pushed to enforce the people), it *should* be the opposite if the court is doing its job of upholding the Constitution. You use a license when you want to authorize use of something you own in a commercial setting. You use copyright when you're protecting authorship of something and have not given it away (something you never really want to do anyway). > I understand that I have to pick a license for my package. You actually do not. Attaching a legal document is purely a secondary protection from those who would take away right already granted by US copyright. > And may be > I'm not free to pick any open source license due the license used by > Secret Labs AB. But how does that relate to the copyright statements? The thing, like I noted, is that they've already released the code into the public eye. Now you must only do your due diligence to honor the *spirit* of their intent. And that spirit, regardless of whether they made it explicit, is almost certainly for non-commercial (non-profit) use. > Should I put my own copyright line in every source file in the package? I would put it as a separate file in the package as well as a comment line in each file referring to your file. > How about the file that re-uses portions of sre_parse.py? Can there or > should there be two copyright lines in that file, one from Secret Labs, > one my own? Show (c) YourName, Secret Labs and carry-forward any additional usage terms from them. -- MarkJ Tacoma, Washington -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
