Bradley Holt wrote: > With all the rights the New BSD > License gives - the fact that the software is copyrighted becomes > practically meaningless unless you're strictly anti-copyright (in which > case I'd think you'd favor the copyleft GPL).
If you are strongly anti-copyright, I think you'd favor the BSD over GPL. As you correctly state, BSD is akin to a public domain waiver, whereas GPL makes full use of the copyrights. > Can you identify a more tangible right that one gets under public domain > that one does not get under the New BSD License? A public domain waiver attempts to abandon all rights. Your earlier post is correct, that it isn't as easy to do that as it should be, but the work is being done. In the case of a work of your own authorship (as opposed to a work with expired copyright), CC0 exists for this purpose. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0 "CC0 is a protocol that enables people to WAIVE to the fullest extent possible under applicable copyright law all rights they have and associate with a work so it has no (or minimal) copyright or neighboring rights restrictions attached to it. To the extent the waiver is not legally effective in any jurisdiction, then the protocol takes the form of a nonexclusive worldwide license to exercise all copyright and neighboring legal rights in the work." I think this is still in Beta, and the corresponding waiver for "expired" works is not complete. To my mind the public domain is desirable because it neatly avoids the subtle complexities of the FOSS license jungle, and it is an accurate legal model for human culture. While GPL is a great hack for turning the guns around, the public domain embraces the fact that published ideas aren't properties. Intellectual property rights are purely artificial. This is not a notion which RMS subscribes to; witness his "classes of works" topic at the St. Mike's talk. The lack of a legal requirement of attribution does not imply that our culture should abandon its tradition of attribution and its taboo of plagiarism. But anyway, great that you are delivering creative work to your clients under BSD. That is an excellent model. More power to you. -- Anthony Carrico
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