Ares 0.15 release

[Bastiaan Veelo]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Actually I don't care. Public domain or something like the Phobos 
> license is fine by me. But as short as possible -- I really *hate* those 
> files where there's 100 lines of legalese and 2 lines of code.

It appears you cannot simply donate files to the public domain. 
According to Lawrence Rosen [1], an attorney who served for many years 
as general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative, "there 
is no accepted way to dedicate an original work of authorship to the 
public domain before the copyright term for that work expires. A license 
is the only recognized way to authorize others to undertake the authors’ 
exclusive copyright rights." This is the reason d'être of all-permissive 
licenses.

I don't think you need the complete license text in every file. Raymond 
and Raymond [2] tell us that "It is not necessary to include a copy of 
the license in every source file, but it is a good idea for the header 
comment to refer readers to the license file with a comment like this:
This program is open source.  For license terms, see the LICENSE file."


> What I'd really like to find is some kind of "non-infect" free license 
> for libraries. That is, you can do anything you like with this code, 
> except that if you redistribute the source code AS SOURCE CODE, it must 
> remain with the same license. So that if it's included in a GPL project, 
> that single file doesn't get GPLed, and if it's in a commercial library 
> where the source is sold, that single file remains free.
> But since I don't know of any license that does that, any unrestricted 
> license (including public domain) will do.

The MIT license [3] does this. The license itself consists of a single 
sentence, followed by a disclaimer.


Best regards,
Bastiaan Veelo


[1] Lawrence Rosen, 2004, "Open Source Licensing -- Software Freedom and 
Intellectual Property Law", Prentice Hall, New Yersey, page 74, 
http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch05.pdf

[2] Raymond E.S.; Raymond, C.O., 2002, Licensing HOWTO [draft OSI 
working paper], http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html

[3] http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php