Solar wrote:Note that waiving your copyright, while perfectly acceptable in the US, is not allowed everywhere. German contributors, for example, cannot legally waive their copyright!
How then have you, or other people, been able to make whole "public domain" code anywhere, and still working in it?
How about "public domain" code originated from countries with very weak or no specific regulations or legal "interest" (and thus no restriction) in public domain, or a place like China where it is supposed that what it takes to get something done is done even if somebody considers it as "piracy" of any kind, but in the end it proves to be a learning stage from which new, original and even superior products are conceived?
And what about some individuals that would claim other's work to be theirs, or public domain code being licensed as GPL by a third party, or vice-versa? I personally would find that rather irrelevant. I am sure there is already a lot of functionally equivalent source code under different licenses, such that, as "open source" initiatives and codebase become stronger and more complete than closed solutions, it becomes less and less of a worry to make something public domain, as there's already plenty of available working code everywhere to choose, and most importantly, the actual algorithms waiting to be implemented (these licences are for the actual source code, NOT for the algorithms after all, or am I wrong? Otherwise it would be a sort of a patent or a right to use an algorithm under one license only, and would greatly limit true software freedom, and would be like trying to limit the use of something that is taught "commonly"), and anyway one isn't going to expect producing billions of lines of code on their own as to be the center of resources and attention.
In short, I think that everyone uses a license that best fits their expectatives, it usually is GPL or commerical, or maybe more BSD-like, and there is a wide margin on the things that could be considered "generic" knowledge or methods and thus there should be little gain for trying to protect those (they are already "common" and known things used frequently by anyone; it would be more of a way of making notice how hard could have been for one as individual to produce something that another "industry professional" team makes rather "easily" and to try to protect it at the same time of being able to publish it). There will always be a way and a place to profit from something, and will always be something to be done, anyway.
