Re: pascal system

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

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.

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.

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