Re: dhcdbd licensing

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Colin Walters <walters verbum org> writes:

> On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 13:22 -0400, Jason Vas Dias wrote:
> 
> > The spec file says it all: 'distributable', which
> > sums up my attitude to licensing.
> > There are intentionally no Copyrights or licensing
> > statements anywhere in the source code. 
> 
> It sounds like what you want then is to place it in the "public domain",
> which gives up any copyright interest in the work.  The traditional way
> AIUI is to simply add a note which looks something like this:
> 
> foo.c; written by Jason Vas Dias
> This file is hereby placed in the public domain.
> 
> See also:
> 
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

(IANAL, and I'm probably going to regret wading into this, but...)

As I understand it, the public domain isn't actually all that great for
code.  It's really only suitable for code snippets/code examples.
People can take the code, make minimal changes to it, and copyright and
represent it as their own.  Additionally, most standard licenses have a
good warranty disclaimer -- the public domain does not.

The Academic Free License is a pretty good BSD-style license, if that's
what you're looking for:

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/academic.php

though putting this particular project under the GNU GPL makes a lot
more sense to me.

Thanks,
-Jonathan