Re: pascal system

["John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.com>]

In article <1149746087.987964.30930@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
 "mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:

> Paul R. Santa-Maria wrote:
> > "John B. Matthews" wrote:
> > > The biggest problem I see with public domain is that there's no way to
> > > enforce a "no warranty" policy.
> >
> > Huh?  Can you explain further?
> 
> With public domain, you're essentially releasing your copyright over
> the work. An issue here is that public domain work doesn't carry with
> it an implicit disclaimer of liability, which is standard practice in
> virtually every software license, and leaves a potential legal loop
> hole through which you can be sued.

IANAL: Indeed, retaining your copyright permits you to compel derivative 
works to include whatever disclaimer you you specify. An explicit 
disclaimer is (presumably) preferable to an implicit one that may or may 
not exist.

> This, plus the "credit where credit is due issue" is the primary reason
> for so called "BSD Style" Open Source licenses, which basically give
> you public domain, with an agreement that you'll acknowledge where you
> got your stuff from somewhere in your products documentation, and a
> disclaimer of liability.
> 
> I usually recommend to those that would choose public domain that they
> choose a BSD Style license instead, preferably one of the OSI approved
> ones.

Good alternative.

> Personally, I prefer the GPL. If I release it for people to use freely,
> I want it to stay that way. If somebody wants to license it for
> commercial purposes, I'm still the copyright holder, and they can
> contact me to obtain a proprietary licensed copy for a fee.
> 
> A nice approach for the fence sitter is the LGPL, or Lesser GPL, which
> removes from the GPL the "infection" clause, which essentially means
> anything you license this way can be used for any purpose, but
> improvements to IT must remain LGPL. This is a nice way to create a
> library that remains free, yet is usable to commercial entities.
> 
> It used to be called the Library GPL, but the potential uses of it
> outside of libraries are significant enough these days that a name
> change was necessary.
> 
> Matt

-- 
John Matthews
jmatthews at wright dot edu
www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/