On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:34:00 -0300, root said: > You don't have the faintest idea of how licencing works. You cannot slap > a GPL v3 license to any software you see, much less erase the author's > names. If you find a code in the internet without any license, you > pretty much can't touch it, and must re-implement it completely. In particular, if code was written in a country that's a signatory to the Berne conventions, it's usually somewhere between very difficult and impossible to actually place a software work in the public domain - at least under US law, even putting an explicit "This work is hereby placed in the public domain" quite likely does *NOT* suffice - the only two clear ways to public domain in the US are expiration of the "lifetime of the author plus 75 years" copyright, and "works for hire by a US federal government employee as part of his duties" (so, for instance, NASA photographs are public domain - but photos of NASA activities taken by non-NASA photographers probably aren't). Also, smart programmers *don't* release their code into the public domain - that means that anybody can do anything with it. And that includes stealing it, using it to make tons of money, and then suing you if they discover a bug. The original reason for the BSD and X11 licenses was because you can't stick a "hold harmless" clause on something you public-domain.
Attachment:
pgpYCNzZK6kxT.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/