[License-discuss] [Non-DoD Source] code.mil update

[Luis Villa]

On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 7:03 AM Christopher Sean Morrison <brlcad at mac.com>
wrote:

>
> > On Mar 8, 2017, at 9:32 AM, Karan, Cem F CIV USARMY RDECOM ARL (US) <
> cem.f.karan.civ at mail.mil> wrote:
> >
> > You might want to re-read what they posted; the license applies only to
> those
> > portions of the code that have copyright attached, otherwise it's public
> > domain.  The trick is that while US Government (USG) works are
> ineligible for
> > copyright within the US, they may be eligible for copyright outside the
> US,
> > and in those areas the USG works are licensed under the OSI-approved
> license.
> > I'm not sure what it would mean for code that was moved across
> jurisdictions,
> > but I do understand and appreciate the intent of their approach.
>
> They’ve slapped a copyright-based license file on the collective work with
> an INTENT file clarifying that it only applies to code that has copyright
> attached.  I read what they wrote very carefully.  We’re saying exactly the
> same thing.
>
> It’s an interesting approach that is not new, just untested and a point of
> dispute in the past as to what might happen.
>

For what little it is worth, having just read intent.md, I think it's an
eminently reasonable policy. It gives some baseline certainty for non-.gov
contributors, non-US entities, and US entities that are satisfied with a
baseline set of FOSS rights. For those who for some reason need the
additional flexibility of US-only PD, they can do the research to figure
out what is available in that way.

Luis
-- 

*Luis Villa: Open Law and Strategy <http://lu.is>*
*+1-415-938-4552*
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