Can OSI specify that public domain is open source?

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Wed Sep 7 19:58:27 UTC 2011


Tom Callaway scripsit:

>   Works of the United States Government for which copyright is
>   unavailable under 17 U.S.C. 105. are considered to be in the Public
>   Domain in the United States. Even though such works are not
>   technically open source, in the United States this means that
>   there are no restrictions on those works. This may not be true in
>   non-US jurisdictions. Public Domain is an extremely complicated and
>   tricky concept, and the OSI does not endorse abandoning your
>   copyrights to place a work into the Public Domain whenever it is
>   avoidable. If you wish to license your work with an extremely
>   permissive "do anything you wish" license that is roughly equivalent
>   to a Public Domain work, consider using the Creative Commons 0
>   License, if possible.

+1

-- 
John Cowan      cowan at ccil.org         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Statistics don't help a great deal in making important decisions.
Most people have more than the average number of feet, but I'm not about
to start a company selling shoes in threes. --Ross Gardler



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