Sean, could you elaborate on what kind of problems are encountered with "Public Domain" licenses in some other countries? I've never heard of this. When you write something, you own the copyright (even without an explicit copyright statement, so long as your name is on it). You can reserve all rights to its distribution and copying, or you can license it to others and list what rights they have and do not have, to do with the material.
A PD license is generally understood to mean "have at it -- I allow you to do whatever you want with this material, up to and including treating it as your own (to an extent)." Other free licenses restrict some aspects, such as requiring all source, including your changes, to be freely distributed. I'm not sure that case law has established once and for all where "ownership" rests, once your original code plus other people's changes/additions are circulating. I'm waiting for an airliner crash due to OSS failure -- you can be sure a lawyer will be looking for a name to pin the blame on. At the other extreme is a license to use the code on a specific number of machines and not to copy it at all (complete transfer to another may even be prohibited). You can certainly put a license on a single line script if you want to -- it all depends on how much control you want to continue to exert over what happens to the material. At the least, most authors want to continue to receive credit for the original work and to prohibit anyone from putting it under a more (or less) restrictive license, even if they never plan to make any money from it. Is a license required? As far as I know, it's not. A license just clarifies what the code's recipient is (and is not) permitted to do with it. A very restricted license (no copying) would normally be implied by a simple copyright (explicit or implicit), though you would probably want to use a standard proprietary-style license of some sort just to clarify things. As for using a source code control system such as SVN, which has been discussed here, I don't see the point unless you're looking to have collaborative authorship. If you have a finished bit of code that you did all by yourself, just put it into a downloadable (and installable, if need be) form and stick it on your Web site or contribute it to some public code repository. No need to make people navigate a source code system just to get a copy. Such a system may be useful for even a solo developer (to keep track of versions and permit rollbacks), but I don't see subjecting others to it just to get a copy of the finished product. Well, after all that, I should tell you that I Am Not A Lawyer, and only play one on TV. Sean O'Connor wrote: > Be careful with the idea of simply putting something out as "public domain". > For a trivial script its not a big deal but anything much larger it can > cause issues for many potential users. This is due to the fact that in > many countries, there is no such thing as "public domain". The concept > simply does not exist in their legal systems. > _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jun 4 - Sqeak! and eToys Jul 2 - KVM (Tenative) Aug 6 - Zenos Sep 3 - TBD
