On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 08:28:31PM -0500, Tom Duerbusch wrote: > John Summerfield wrote: > >Please, take care with your language. "public domain" means that I can > >take it, change it, copyright it, not reveal my changes etc. > Yes, you are right. I keep getting the variety of terms mixed up. Public > Domain isn't the same as "GNU" (is it?).
Correct. Those terms aren't even on the same plane. "GNU" is a project formed to develop software (specifically an operating system), while "public domain" is a legal term indicating the absence of copyright. In order to meet the goals of the GNU project, a license was developed, called the GNU General Public License (often abbreviated "GPL"), and most of their software is released under this license (copyrighted, and not in the public domain). You can learn more about it than you ever cared to know here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html > And it seems like there is a third type (or perhaps just another term that > is the same as a previous term). If you mean licenses, there are too many to enumerate, but the terms which cause the most confusion in this area are "free software" and "open source", both of which are described in excruciating detail in many documents which can be easily located on the web. -- - mdz
