Re: putting things in the public domain: Daniel J. Bernstein and Lawrence Rosen (of Creative Commons fame, I believe) seem to disagree with you on that: http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
Plus, pretty much the only 'license' djb uses is public domain, so qmail, djbdns, etc. are all public domain. Incidentally, SQLite (*not* written by djb) is *also* public domain, and very widely used, too. As for being sued for public domain code... I would say it is hard to sue an owner that does not exist (which is what public domain seems to do). Plus, they would probably have to prove malice or something. (I personally still wouldn't do it though!) On Oct 6, 2011 7:02 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:34:00 -0300, root said: > >> You don't have the faintest idea of how licencing works. You cannot slap >> a GPL v3 license to any software you see, much less erase the author's >> names. If you find a code in the internet without any license, you >> pretty much can't touch it, and must re-implement it completely. > > In particular, if code was written in a country that's a signatory to the Berne > conventions, it's usually somewhere between very difficult and impossible to > actually place a software work in the public domain - at least under US law, > even putting an explicit "This work is hereby placed in the public domain" > quite likely does *NOT* suffice - the only two clear ways to public domain in > the US are expiration of the "lifetime of the author plus 75 years" copyright, > and "works for hire by a US federal government employee as part of his duties" > (so, for instance, NASA photographs are public domain - but photos of NASA > activities taken by non-NASA photographers probably aren't). > > Also, smart programmers *don't* release their code into the public domain - > that means that anybody can do anything with it. And that includes stealing it, > using it to make tons of money, and then suing you if they discover a bug. The > original reason for the BSD and X11 licenses was because you can't stick a > "hold harmless" clause on something you public-domain. >
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