>Now about licenses: >There are some nice short licenses like X11/Expat/BSD'/Artistic'/ >Perl. Check the list on the gnu.org pages for more details. >And of course there is public domain. Public domain is fine for >small programs (like my CPULEVEL one). However, it does not protect >anything. Somebody could take the code, cut and paste it into some >other product and start selling it as closed source.
So what? The original code is still available as public domain, it hasn't vanished or been corrupted by the dark side of the force if someone subsumes it into their own pet project. If you have an official project maintainer, you still have the same protection on what code gets added to a known or endorsed project. Why the heck do you care what someone else does with your contribution elsewhere? A lot of people should consider getting over the ego stance of "well, I want people to be able to use and examine this for free, but I don't want those people to have shared control of the code." And from what I've ever encountered in his interviews, a founder of the Free Software Foundation appears to have the same control issues (e.g. call it GNU-Linux, not Linux, or I won't talk to your press people). That arrogance reflects a fundamental attitude which has directly contributed to innumerable interpretation and redistribution questions and problems with GPL'ed software. Now GPL has "Compliance Engineers", which reminds me of the joke about sanitation engineers. I don't know whether having a Compliance Engineer is funny or scary, but it is not a good sign for people who just want to use free software. Public domain can work for larger projects. And I do happen to know that from personal experience. It is an approach which has been around a lot longer than either Open Source Initiative or Free Software Foundation, and it is more open and free than any license-based model will ever be. Is open source [no caps] inherently a much better approach than closed or proprietary for community-based projects? Sure. Is it inherently better than public domain? Usually not. Can FreeDOS be public domain? No, because it depends on external software which will never be public domain, and not everyone contributing will want to surrender full control. But FreeDOS can certainly have a much higher percentage of public domain code, and it would be all the better for it. ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now. Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1356&alloc_id=3438&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-kernel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-kernel
