IANAL... Once something has been released into the public domain, then it is free. I can use it to create a derivative work under my own copyright. The derivative work can have very minimal changes such as simple formatting. For examples look at any of the republished classic texts. Note the copyrights on them. Also look at the GRASS project
Which was originally public domain from the Army and now exists in a GPL version and in one or two commercial products. http://grass.ibiblio.org/index2.html Joel -------- From: Andrew Koenig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 19 Nov 2002 09:35:49 -0500 To: Boost mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subj: Re: [boost] Boost License Issues Joel> The author releases the software into the public domain. Ten Joel> seconds later boost copyrights the software and releases it Joel> under the Boost Public License... I believe that once something is in the public domain, it can no longer be copyrighted. Anyone who likes can attach any kind of notice to it, but those notices have no effect because the original item is in the public domain. My understanding is that this state of affairs is one reason why the Free Software Foundation refuses to distribute the source code for the implementation of the Icon programming language: The authors (University of Arizona) have placed the implementation in the public domain, but the FSF distributes only material that is covered by the GPL. -- Andrew Koenig, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.research.att.com/info/ark _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
