On Mon, 2009-09-14 at 21:14 -0400, Steve Bertrand wrote: > The company that employs me is very small, and although I don't believe > there will ever be a problem with giving my code away, I want to take > advantage of the fact that I have never signed anything to say I > ``can't'' give it away. I'm at a stage where some of our staff is > testing, so before the powers-that-be decide that this is company code: >
If the code is valuable enough to be fighting over, I'd get an explicit understanding of what's yours and what's the companies. Gentlemen's agreements get ugly when there's enough money involved. Actually, I'd do that anyway, but that's just me. > What is the quickest and easiest way to ensure my code is truly licensed > as public domain, if I don't feel that the code is quite CPAN worthy? > There is no such thing. Public domain means 'no one owns it' (subject to whatever legal domain you happen to be in; All sorts of wrinkles there depending on the local legal system from what I understand). In order to license something, you must own it (or 'own' rights to license it). Yes, I'm being pedantic, but if you want clean licensing of your code, you need to get it right. > Do I put it somewhere with a license in it? Can I simply share it with > someone else, with a license in it? If the license is short and sweet (BSD style) perhaps include the license text inline at the start of the file along with a copyright statement (which *must* have the year of copyright as I understand it), or refer to 'license.txt' and include the license in the file. Each file in the release should have a copyright notice and the license or a reference to the license file. If you really are putting the code in the public domain, a short statement saying so should suffice (in which case you can't add license terms or claim copyright). > > Steve Not giving legal advice and most certainly not an expert, Tim Bowden -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
