For Approval: Academic Citing License

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Rousskov (rousskov at measurement-factory.com):
> On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Rick Moen wrote:

> >...in each case, basically the project lead developer was using 
> >"public domain" as shorthand to mean "I don't understand licensing 
> >and/or want the problem to go away".
> 
> and/or as a shorthand to mean "my understanding of a Public Domain 
> concept differs from that of Rick Moen" :-/.

I've decided I'm not _quite_ done with you, Mr. Rousskov, so please
don't slink off quite so quickly.  Let's consider one handy example of
what you call "an understanding differing from that of Rick Moen",
http://wabburami.sourceforge.net/ :

This is a PalmOS game codebase that runs as bytecode in Waba, a Java-like 
interpreter.  "License: Public Domain".  Developer is listed as "David
M. Archer".

Upon examination, docs state that it's derived from Sun's Rumor game
distributed at the 1999 JavaOne developer conference, and on a C code
version Archer found in SCO's Open License Software Supplement
(Skunkware) archive, ftp://ftp.sco.com/skunkware/ .  Asked if he knew
the licence terms for the predecessor works, Archer's response was to
attack the motives of the questioner at length, call him names, and 
suggest that the questioner should do any licence research deemed
necessary.

Ergo, it became obvious that, in this case ""an understanding differing
from that of Rick Moen" meant "I grabbed this and am misrepresenting my
derivative work as public domain despite not having permission from
upstream authors... because I can".   

-- 
Cheers,               Everything is gone;
Rick Moen             Your life's work has been destroyed.
rick at linuxmafia.com   Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
                       -- David Carlson (winner, haiku error message contest)