Re: public domain dedications proliferation
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Warner Losh
On a related question, there's several licenses that are close to the public domain. Eg: "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42): <phk@...> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp which, apart from the markup issues being tied to a specific author, is very close to the public domain.... unless you desire to but phk a beer, and he wants one when you offer... but if he'd dedicated it to the public domain and I wanted to buy him a beer the end results would be identical. Likewise if I didn't want to buy him a beer in both cases. This is a current license in the SPDX list, however. And I think that's proper because the additional term "retain notice" makes it a license to use with mild conditions, rather than a repudiation of ownership. A number of posters raise the points about EU law differing enough from US law that public domain creates difficulties, which people have worked around with additional words in different ways. So, what separates those workarounds from the above beer-ware license, apart from the lack of the phrase 'public domain'? Is that the defining characteristic? Or is there some other touchstone to separate the vague "sure, whatever" from the "I disclaim ownership" from the "I disclaim ownership, but if I can't do that and still own the damn thing, here's the deal"? We can assume a large disparity in the care that these dedications are drafted, and as such we should expect a continuum of actual grants when all of them basically wanted people to do whatever with it. Warner On Mon, Aug 15, 2022 at 5:15 PM J Lovejoy <opensource@...> wrote:
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