>> Rather, I think such a declaration is not established to be an effective >> divestment of copyright in all the jurisdictions where Debian recipients >> operate, and the risk to them is unacceptable —
In addition to what Ian said, Debian already accepts Public Domain software, even though public domain is completely meaningless in some jurisdictions. > Are you aware of _any_ case where a piece of software was released > with a statement from its copyrightholders saying it was "public > domain", but where later the copyrightholders reneged on the implied > permissions ? > > Note that even copyrightholders who use proper Free copyright licences > sometimes make legally unfounded claims against us or our downstreams. > Empirically I would be very surprised if the risk from legally-naive > copyrightholders, who try to `put things in the public domain', was > greater than the risk from copyrightholders who issue proper licences. > > We're not talking about a situation where the whole thing might be a > deliberate trap. If someone like IBM or Oracle came out with a > `public domain' statement we should be very suspicious - but that's > not (ever) what we're dealing with. > > And all of this is before we get into questions of estoppel (or its > equivalent in various jurisdictions). Theoretically, this could fail the "Tentacles of Evil" test. Although I think that the estoppel defense would be enough to stop this. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/543c2dec.10...@bitmessage.ch
