Quoting Marius Amado Alves ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > I know all this. But can you give an open source software without a > license?
Think of it this way: There's a default licence (absent an explicit licence statement) that is implicit in copyright law. Copyright law grants to lawful recipients the right to compile and the right to use -- but not the right to create derivative works or redistribute.[1] Because the rights to create derivative works and redistribute are an important core concept of what we mean by "open source", works under such terms are classified as proprietary. For example, most software produced by Daniel J. Bernstein was released in that state -- as a deliberate choice, since Bernstein happens to like the resulting rights grant. In the mailing list thread, the querent asked how it was possible to give someone a software codebase under "no licence". That was the question I asked. The querent didn't ask if the resulting software would be proprietary. Had he asked that question, my answer would have been "yes". [1] I'm speaking of copyright statutes in countries that are signatory to the Berne Convention on Copyrights. This covers almost all countries; it's possible that some of the exceptions have significantly different copyright regimes, though I doubt it. -- Cheers, I've been suffering death by PowerPoint, recently. Rick Moen -- Huw Davies [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3