Public domain software is not open-source?

[Alexander Terekhov]

<clarification>

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Alexander Terekhov
<alexander.terekhov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 6:02 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> >
> > Nigel Tzeng wrote:
> >
> > Public Domain software, when the source code is available, meets all of the
> > OSD requirements but it isn't under a OSI approved Open Source license since
> > there is no license.   However, public domain software can be re-used under
> > an OSD compliant license, so in practice the issue is moot.
> >
> > That's a nice, clean summary. /Larry
>
> I suggest that you write an article explaining how public domain
> software can be "re-used" under a copyright license stating for
> example that "This Open Software License (the "License") applies to
> any original work of authorship (the "Original Work") whose owner (the
> "Licensor") has placed the following licensing notice adjacent to the
> copyright notice for the Original Work: ..." and purporting to grant
> something that doesn't belong to the owner (the "Licensor") because
> former original owner put it into public domain. I suspect that it
> will be no less exciting than your piece on public domain analogizing
> waiver or abandonment of copyright to dumping of personal property in
> the public highway. :-)

I meant

http://www.rosenlaw.com/html/GL15a.pdf

"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump
personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits
the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain — except
as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire."

Refuted by DJB:

http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html

"Rosen claims an analogy between littering and abandoning a copyright:
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump
personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits
the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain."

In fact, there are laws against littering, and those laws put
considerable limits on the ways in which you can abandon your real
property. There are no laws against abandoning a copyright."

regards,
alexander.

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