[License-review] NOSA 2.0 and Government licensing [was: moving to an issue tracker [was Re: Some notes for license submitters]]

[Bruce Perens]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:18 AM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

>
> In all other jurisdictions, it is fully protected by U.S. and foreign
> copyright.
>

People are discussing this as if the problem was unique to NASA or the
United States Government. Not so. In reality, it effects every Open Source
program and all Open Source copyright holders. 17 USC 102(b) disallows the
application of copyright to functional things, and there is much text in
every program that is thus not subject to copyright. There is also the
matter that much of the work in computer programs is not an original work
or authorship (for example, some of it is the work of a machine) and thus
can not be copyrighted. These portions are in the public domain.

We take care of this in our licenses by granting permissions on the entire
work, whether or not we actually have rights to grant on any particular
part. And yet there has been no attack of an Open Source license on a
severability basis that I know of. NASA can do the same thing, and grant
permissions regarding the entire work. Or alternatively they can actually
dedicate the public domain works to the public domain, removing the
ambiguity of where they are and are not public domain.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20180620/9d6cfcb4/attachment.html>