Joseph Dal Molin wrote: /snip/
> ...the bottom line is that you can do anything > you want with public domain software..... /snip/ As far as I know there is one very important thing that's central to this discussion that you can *not* do with public domain software. You can not copyright it. Perhaps your research discovered that I'm mistaken on that point. If so, please point me to the statute or case law and I'll be satisfied. If not, then the question regarding what constitutes a derivative work that *can* be copyrighted (with a GPL or other OSS license) so that additions / contributions are protected remains to be answered. The link Greg supplied Court Evaluates Meaning of "Derivative Work" in an Open Source License. http://articles.corporate.findlaw.com/articles/file/00050/008924 shows how non-trivial this issue is. If contributions to a work in the Public Domain also become Public Domain, thus allowing anyone to, for example, sell them without even attributing the work to the actual authors, the incentive to contribute is diminished. > This implies that the VA must have waived its > rights to copyright somewhere or by default it > holds the copyright.... which changes things > quite a bit.... According to Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the CFR, "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government..." Circular 1 at the Copyright office ( http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#piu ) contains a section titled "Publications Incorporating U.S. Government Works" that seems to me to offer some hope re: derivative works. On the other hand, the "law" at any point in time consists of both the statutes and the judicial interpretations of those statutes as found in case law. It's fun to cogitate and speculate on what the law might be but, before I'm convinced, I'll need to hear it from a lawyer. Best regards, Bill ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: InterSystems CACHE FREE OODBMS DOWNLOAD - A multidimensional database that combines robust object and relational technologies, making it a perfect match for Java, C++,COM, XML, ODBC and JDBC. www.intersystems.com/match8 _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
