[License-discuss] Possible alternative was: Re: U.S. Army Research Laboratory Open Source License (ARL OSL) Version 0.4.1

[Lawrence Rosen]

Jim Wright wrote:

> it seems odd to me to require a dedication to the public domain in any event - stuff is either in the public domain by law or isn’t, and to whatever extent it isn’t, we should have a copyright license, full stop.  Similarly as to patents, I don’t want to have to look at some ostensible policy on waiving patent rights, we should all have a clearly scoped patent license for the project, government and private contributors alike, and there is an easy vehicle to achieve this, use an OSI approved license.  

 

Jim, regardless of which OSI-approved license(s) the U.S. government chooses for its distributed software, neither the "public domain" question nor the "patent license" question will EVER be fully answered for any particular software simply by reading those licenses. You have to look at the software itself. Of course, we could all sue each other and let the courts decide....

 

I'll be grateful for a published government policy – perhaps posted in the Federal Register someday – that reassures us of a commitment by government agencies to open source using any OSI-approved license.

 

Including CC0.

 

/Larry

 

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