I believe that the OSI is not USA only, so I hope this question does receive some discussion.
On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Russell Nelson wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > So Americans can ignore the civil-servant version of the NOSA license with > > impunity, but not so Australians. > > Interesting ... so what happens if an American citizen takes public > domain US Government software into Australia and starts redistributing > it there? But I suppose that's a problem that the NOSA will fix, so > at least for this discussion it's a moot point. What if any US citizen took this work that is under the public domain (for them) and applied a BSD (or any other) license and redistributed worldwide? It appears that with US government created works that every US citizen has the right to apply licenses to the work, so whether any specific citizen (or a group) applied a NOSA license doesn't seem all that relevant. Which license agreements apply to a Canadian like myself? I would suspect any of them -- whether it be the NOSA agreement or the BSD or whatever other license an American wishes to apply to this public domain work. If I don't like the NOSA agreement I can just call a friend in the USA who can offer me the work to me in a BSD license. I think there is an interesting question being opened up by this discussion. Given that term expiry is not the only way for a work to enter the public domain, and term expiry can be different in different countries (A Disney production gets 95 years in the USA but fortunately only 50 years in Canada), are the other methods to enter into the public domain also country specific? It was always my understanding that a work that was released into the public domain by its author (Such as by a public domain dedication http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ ) in the USA or any other country that this work was instantaneously in the public domain in all countries. This thread is outside the topic of license approval so is likely considered off-topic. This is unless we want to consider the worldwide applicability of the Creative Commons "public domain dedication" as an OSI license approval question. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Perspective of a digital copyright reformer on Sheila Copps, MP. http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/copps-ndp.html Discuss at: http://www.lulu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2757 -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3