Ares 0.15 release

[Don Clugston]

Bastiaan Veelo wrote:
> 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 raison d'être of all-permissive
> licenses.

Interesting. I read somewhere that the US library of congress has a 
special provision for shareware, and that by paying them a filing fee 
you get public domain in practice. I doubt many people have actually 
done that, however. I suspect that public domain works OK in some 
countries but not others. As always, the legal system is several decades 
behind reality...


> 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."

That's great news. I will do that from now on.

>> 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.

Thanks!


> 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