Jeff, On 9/11/2013 6:27 PM, Jeff Epler wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 07:41:36PM -0500, Charles Steinkuehler wrote: >> If there are no objections, I will add a header indicating I release the >> various device tree files I wrote into the public domain. > I would greatly prefer not calling new contributions to LinuxCNC "public > domain". As we have seen, this leads to FUD, including some people > claiming that it's possible that none of LinuxCNC is protected by > copyright.
I'd like to try to lower the group "FUD" level a bit before people start thinking that public domain software has some inherent problem wrt to being used in LCNC. It is not "public domain" that creates the issues I think you are referring to (the Wichita licensing status discussions) . To avoid creating more FUD, let's recap some topics. "Public domain works": Putting a work into the public domain is an act which can be taken by the owner of the rights of a "work". Since that author _has_ those rights as a result of the creation of the work, one of the things they can do with the rights is to give them to other people. Rights can be sold; which transfers the ownership of the rights from one entity to another. Rights can be granted: in which case the owner retains their rights associated with ownership of the work, but shares them others. Such sharing of rights can be with or without conditions. When conditions are required, you have a "license" situation. When conditions are not required, you create a situation where anyone can use the original owner's rights in the work. This is often called "pubic domain". "Putting something into public domain" just means that the (c) owner is exercising their rights and granting everyone unrestricted access to their work. There is a a key point to observe here: One has to have (own) the (c) rights before one can exercise them. "non-(C) works": The same action of granting unrestricted rights to anyone is not possible for a work for which no copy rights ever have existed, or can exist. For example, US law says that (some) works that are produced by parts of the US government simply have no (c) rights attached to them. By law there is no (c) owner for such works. When there are neither any copy rights attached to a work, nor a (c) owner (as one can't own rights that do not exist for the work), that non-copyright covered work can't be "put into the public domain" (as doing so would require the exercise of the rights that don't exist for the work). Yes, the end result from a 3rd party viewpoint is pretty much the same - the 3rd party can do whatever they like with the work. However, the status of the work itself and what rights are attached to the work are not the same. I go to the trouble to walk thru this so that we can realize that if one distinguishes between (c) covered works that are licensed into the "public domain" and "works that have no (c) attached to them", we can avoid additional "FUD" by understanding that "public domain" works do not create an issue for LCNC. Thus, 1) The use of "public domain" (works which the (C) holder has chosen to place into the public domain) within LCNC is not a problem. 2) The use of works which are not subject to any (C) rights, is also not a problem for the LCNC project. I will repeat that: Using/including either "public domain and/or non-(C) works does not create a problem for the project. In contrast, attempting to apply (any) license to a non-(c) work is where trouble comes (and the implications of past attempts to do that is what much of the Wichita discussion was about). However, that topic is not relevant to this discussion of "what license would be nice for config files". > If you want to apply a liberal license which is > GPL-compatible, I believe the BSD-without-advertising, MIT, and zlib > licenses are frequently suggested for this purpose. > > I singled out the files I mentioned because they looked to me "like > code". Traditionally, "configuration files" in our tree have not had > any copyright notice or license and I don't know why that is. > > It absolutely would not *hurt* for configuration files to have license > statements, because when it comes to configuration files, we should be > just as clear that people have the right to use, modify, and > redistribute them as we are when it comes to the source code. > > I personally prefer that each individual file have a copyright notice > and license grant where possible, because a file is often a fundamental > unit that people copy around. This follows the GPLv3's suggestion that > "[i]t is safest to attach [terms and conditions] to the start of each > source file"; the GPLv2's wording is just about identical. > > Jeff Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How ServiceNow helps IT people transform IT departments: 1. Consolidate legacy IT systems to a single system of record for IT 2. Standardize and globalize service processes across IT 3. Implement zero-touch automation to replace manual, redundant tasks http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=51271111&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
