Hi Jonathan! On Thursday 19 March 2009 17:46:39 Jonathan Yu wrote: > Hi all: > > I'm working on a module that will be released into the Public Domain. > It contains some code that is, itself, in the public domain by another > author. > > There has been a lot of discussion on the implications of Public > Domain software in places that do not have the notion of Public > Domain, particularly on the Debian list about copyright law in > Germany. > > What I did to get around this is provide a clause in the module like so: > > # All rights to this package are hereby disclaimed and its contents > released # into the public domain by the author. Where this is not > possible, you may # use this file under the same terms as Perl itself. >
Well, if you're keen on being faithful to the public-domain nature of the code, you may wish to instead say "Where this is not possible, you may use this file under the terms of the MIT X11 Licence ( http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php )", which is the closes licence you can get to PD. (Except for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL , but it's kinda a joke). I had written about why saying "This program can be used under the same terms as Perl itself" is problematic here: http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi+Fish/journal/36050 (also read the comments). If you still want to licence it under the same terms as Perl, make sure you also include the 2.0 version ("and later" - very important) of the Artistic Licence, which is all of GPL-compatible, allows use by proprietary software, and phrased much more sanely and less ambiguously than the original Artistic licence. The default "Same terms as Perl" includes only the GPLv2 and above and only the original Artistic Licence - neither of which are very useful. Regards, Shlomi Fish > So it's released into the public domain, but also the Perl license > (Artistic + GPL) to get around this problem. I have chosen thus far to > reflect this in the Build.PL as: license => 'unrestricted' (ie, > unrestricted distribution). > > What I am wondering is- is this the most appropriate license clause to > use? Should I link to the Perl licensing terms for the META.yml (ie, > http://dev.perl.org/licenses/) OR should I keep my current link of a > paper studying public domain software > (http://edwardsamuels.com/copyright/beyond/articles/public.html) > > Thanks in advance for your guidance :-) > > Cheers, > > Jonathan Yu > (PAUSE: FREQUENCY) -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Understand what Open Source is - http://xrl.us/bjn82 God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read.
