Trent W.Buck writes: > (Remember: without a license declaration, it's a violation of > copyright law for us to have work in the Darcs repository!)
Wrong. It's not illegal at all, at least not in the U.S. There, it's a violation of the law to attempt to profit from intentional unlicensed activities using the work. But even then, there's wiggle room if you can make a plausible case that you had good reason to believe in an implicit license (eg, contribution by the author of the code to an open source project with a well-known policy about its license). I think this is pretty generally true across jurisdictions, but I only know for sure about the U.S. and Japan (where it's also true). Since Darcs is clearly non-profit, we're talking about torts (causing damage to the owner of property), not violations of law. This is like playground basketball: if the "victim" doesn't complain, there was no foul. The danger here is that (1) without an explicit declaration of license, the owner of the copyright can easily and arbitrarily withdraw his code claiming "I didn't say you could use it *yet*", or change the license, and (2) without explicit declarations of license, the argument that the project has a well-known policy becomes weaker. For those reasons, among others, I think it's a *very* good idea for Darcs to have a policy requiring explicit licensing of contributions, especially since it uses a copyleft license. Since it's not hard to comply if you want to, strict enforcement of policy is also a good idea. Just don't spread (unintentional, I'm sure) FUD about what the law says. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
