On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 7:19 PM, Robinson, Norman <robins...@state.gov> wrote: > Greetings! > > In review of SPDX specification (spdx.org/), I’m not seeing a clear > annotation for U.S. Public Domain. Could you please clarify if such a > license currently exists and I have failed to understand or find it? Any > links or clarification appreciated! > > As a federal government employee involved with open source projects, I would > like to understand if we can have a SPDX license for public domain or > government works to better enable federal agencies to contribute code and > make the licensing and copyright clear. There is currently an efforts to > renew support for custom software code (sourcecode.cio.gov/)to ensure all > government produced works are clearly promoted and licensing is required to > be open source. Having a license targeted at public domain, or specifically > referencing government contribution, might promote and encourage open source > licensing. > > As you may be aware, for federal employees and most government agencies, the > copyright is simply “This is a work of the U.S. Government and is not > subject to copyright protection in the United States. Foreign rights may > apply.” that falls into the public domain. In terms of operational > knowledge, that is also affected by the government contract with vendors, > and how the rights are asserted and assumed. Reference: > www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html; > www.acq.osd.mil/dpap/dars/dfars/html/current/252227.htm. It seems this new > initiative – although one could simply state it is related to government > failing to clearly mark contracted works as public domain – is to > specifically assign an open source license approach, to assert specific > copyright as the law allows agencies to do for specific needs. In this case, > I pull that rationale from the linked sites as the need to “enables Federal > employees to work together—both within and across agencies—to reduce costs, > streamline development, apply uniform standards, and ensure consistency in > creating and delivering information.6 Enhanced reuse of custom-developed > code across the Federal Government can have significant benefits for > American taxpayers, such as reducing Federal vendor lock-in,7 decreasing > duplicative costs for the same code, increasing transparency across the > Federal Government, and minimizing the challenges associated with > integrating large blocks of code from multiple sources.”
This is awesome! > I’m happy to make a recommendation on the SPDX format, if you care to > respond and let me know if there have been additional discussions on this > topic to be considered, if an existing license is recommended, or if in > review you agree there is a need for such a specification. This would be great and makes a lot of sense to me. Getting this as a license in the list would mean consistency and simplicity both for the agencies releasing code and for their recipients. I have seen various ways Federal agencies handle this such as the NIST in [1] (ignoring the funny Untied States typo). At the minimum I would in much favor to have a license identifier for a generic dedication to the public domain beyond the existing Creative Commons CC0. Alternatively I have seen projects use a choice of a custom dedication or CC0 such as in [2]. This helps deal with some countries (Germany? ) that do not recognize public domain and is not incompatible with having an id. Legal mavens, what's your take? [1] https://java.net/projects/jsip/sources/svn/content/trunk/src/gov/nist/javax/sdp/MediaDescriptionImpl.java?rev=2364 [2] https://github.com/search?q=cc0+public+domain+jurisdiction&type=Code -- Cordially Philippe Ombredanne _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
