[License-discuss] Can OSI take stance that U.S. public domain is open source?

[Henrik Ingo]

On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 3 May 2014 22:07:19 +0300
> Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:
>
>> Does the US government grant itself patents,
>
> Yes.
>
>> and if so, what does it
>> do with those patents?
>
> Many are licensed to the private sector for revenue.

That is so perverse I cannot even formulate words to explain how I
feel about that...

Wrt the original question it seems there are good grounds to ask
federal employees to pony up an actual open source license, especially
one of those that includes a patent license. That said, it seems most
will agree that the public domain copyright is for all intents and
purposes open source. I suppose this is comparable to how artistic
license is open source but preferably you'd use a better license.

henrik



-- 
henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
+358-40-5697354        skype: henrik.ingo            irc: hingo
www.openlife.cc

My LinkedIn profile: http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/henrik-ingo/3/232/8a7