Alex Rousskov scripsit: > Or is the legal world so badly broken that it is practically > impossible to reliably place software in public domain?
Pretty much. Dedications to the public domain have been rare to nonexistent in the past, and nobody is quite sure whether they can actually be achieved or not in any one jurisdiction, much less across all jurisdictions. Much safer to make use of the well-established mechanism of licensing, using some machinery such as the MIT, BSD, or AFL licenses. In general, it is not surprising to find a lack of legal machinery for doing what until now very few people have wanted to do. Until 1976, it was trivial to keep documents out of copyright in the U.S. -- just publish them without a copyright notice. > Do I have to > release two derivative versions of the same software, one in PD and > one OSI licensed (the "derivation" would be the change of the > licensing file or source file headers, for example)?? If you must, but it seems unnecessary to me just to make a point about the evils of copyright. Evil or not, we're stuck with it under the current worldwide regime, where to a first approximation everything is in copyright. -- "No, John. I want formats that are actually John Cowan useful, rather than over-featured megaliths that http://www.ccil.org/~cowan address all questions by piling on ridiculous http://www.reutershealth.com internal links in forms which are hideously [EMAIL PROTECTED] over-complex." --Simon St. Laurent on xml-dev -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3