Rick Moen scripsit: > That is, I _believe_ Russ was reminding us all of a fact sometimes > forgotten, that suitable licensing is a necessary but not sufficient > requirement for open source, and always has been: E.g., if someone > releases a binary codebase and claim it's BSD, you might reasonably > believe it's open source -- but then you might notice that the source > has for whatever reason never appeared or is no longer findable.
OSD #2 covers that: it is the only clause applicable to programs rather than their licenses. But there is of course no similar clause requiring a program to be usable, and there cannot be. In general, the OSD only works because copyright law is effectively worldwide. We cannot go saying that some well-known work is not open source because someone holds a patent on its methods in Azerbaijan. > At the beginning of the CC0 evaluation, I opined: (1) It's obviously > OSD-compliant. (2) It would be helpful if CC would drop the patent > waiver from section 4a, leaving open the possibility if not likelihood > of implicit patent grants and defences based on estoppel -- and OSI > should ask CC to please consider doing so. Agreed, although CC apparently is swamped at present and can't process such a request. > (3) Irrespective of CC0's merits as a fallback permissive licence, > the document's fundamental reason for existing is foolhardy: the > delusional belief that creative works can be safely magicked into the > public domain despite a worldwide copyright regime, I think this language is much too strong. It's true that there is no treaty or statutory language allowing abandonment, but most proprietary rights can be abandoned by appropriate action. I abandon hundreds of rights in personal property every week when I take the trash to the curb. We simply don't know how well copyright abandonment works, which is why CC0 sensibly provides a backup license. > and the equally delusional belief that it's even desirable to try (and > thereby, among other problems, have no protection against warranty > claims). It's unclear that warranty claims have any teeth against something neither sold nor offered for sale. You'd have a hard time enforcing a warranty on something you found in the trash. Someone in the other thread raised the points of first sale and patent exhaustion, but by the same token I doubt if pulling source code off a website counts as a sale: there is neither an express nor an implied contract here, I'd say. -- There are three kinds of people in the world: John Cowan those who can count, co...@ccil.org and those who can't. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss