BSD and OSD

[Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M.]

One point of information: strictly speaking, the filing with the copyright
office is NOT required to obtain copyright protection. The filing provides
certain benefits in terms of presumptions and statutory remedies, but some
of these benefits are reduced if the filing is for software and is in the
form of object code rather than source code.

In addition, the "All rights reserved." clause is meaningless in the United
States. If your work is going to be distributed outside the U.S. (which is a
good assumption on the Internet), then the clause may serve a statutory
purpose in some countries, but, this too, is questionable as a result of
treaties.

Rod


___________________________________
Rod Dixon
Visiting Assistant Professor of Law
Rutgers University School of Law - Camden
www.cyberspaces.org
rod at cyberspaces.org



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wes Bethel [mailto:wbethel at r3vis.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 10:02 PM
> To: Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M.
> Cc: W. Yip; license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: BSD and OSD
>
>
>
> something in this caught my eye:
>
> > First, charging a fee (selling) for software is fine in open
> source and free
> > software. As you know, "Free" means free(dom) from the (real or
> perceived)
> > limitations of copyright, (free speech not "free beer.") As
> long as the user
> > may freely copy and modify the source code, the price of the
> software does
> > not necessarily affect whther the software is open source.
> Although the BSD
> > license does not contain a copyleft provision, that would not
> mean is not
> > properly viewed as open source. The issue is whether the restrictions
> > permitted by the license take the software out of the open
> source movement.
> > Since the BSD license does not contain a copyleft, it permits
> code-forking.
> > Consequently, some of those forks could lead to non-free/closed source
> > software.
> >
>
> i have the following impression which may or may not be accurate:
> Jo Coder has a closed source project which s/he turns into an
> Open Source project, using L/GPL (take your pick) as the license.
> however, when Jo makes this transition, s/he asserts copyright on
> the source.
> 	 (C) Copyright 2000, Jo Coder
> (notice the absence of "All Rights Reserved.") then, in order to
> further prevent forking, Jo files paperwork with the US Copyright
> office to assert copyright protection for this project - so that
> some big boy doesn't come along and snarf the project, starting
> a new project of the same name with the same code.
>
> what am i missing?
>
> tx,
> wes
> --
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> Wes Bethel                                          wbethel at r3vis.com
> R3vis Corporation                                http://www.r3vis.com/
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