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Code-dot-mil / code.mil

An experiment in open source at the Department of Defense.
https://www.code.mil
MIT License
1.29k stars 127 forks source link

Why not Public Domain? #52

Closed impredicative closed 7 years ago

impredicative commented 7 years ago

What is all this licensing, copyright and contractual nonsense? Isn't federal work supposed to be in the public domain? No other license need be attached or considered.

oddnoc commented 7 years ago

This was my immediate reaction as well. Most government intellectual property is automatically in the public domain. By definition, if there is no copyright, there can be no license; to put it another way, DoD has no power to license the code, as it is already in the public domain.

Not even CC0 is appropriate, as that is a waiver of copyright, which right does not exist in the code proposed to be released.

I am not a lawyer, just an informed citizen.

sensei-hacker commented 7 years ago

Many countries, and international treaties, have no concept of "public domain". Therefore public domain won't work if any users are outside the US.

On the other hand, a license similar to the WTFpl would solve the need for a license, without putting any restrictions on the code.

jad-issa commented 7 years ago

@MorrisR2 Oh really! I wonder if mine has!

impredicative commented 7 years ago

@MorrisR2 , I acknowledge, but to the best of my knowledge, the US federal government cannot legally assign a license or copyright. With regard to those other countries, I suggest petitioning those countries to embrace PD, or have a civilian in the US clone the relevant repos and simply add a suitable OSS license. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

sensei-hacker commented 7 years ago

@impredicative Under section 105, the section you have in mind, the government indeed may not assert copyright rights (to certain things). They may certainly disclaim such rights; they may point out that there are no restrictions. For that purpose, the purpose of explicity not asserting rights, we can use the Morris Public License:

Morris Public License Version 1.0

1) Authorization to copy, modify, and distribute

Any person, may copy, modify, distribute, or otherwise use the work in any form, without copyright restriction of any kind. All copy rights are hereby disclaimed.

2) Disclamer of warranties THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM âoeAS ISâ WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

tomberek commented 7 years ago

Please see the FAQ for the response for why this project exists. Changing the global copyright regime, while interesting and ambitious, is out of scope for this project at the moment. We are considering a non-contractual approach (see #33,#34) for which we would appreciate comment.

Closing as answered. Feel free to reopen to continue discussion.