[Toybox] license.html page update.

[Rob Landley]

On 04/17/14 10:14, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> While I'm quite in favor of the public domain and would not object if
> all my contributions were released in the public domain with a clause
> explicitly not requiring attribution, I tend towards pedantism regarding
> what public domain is.
> (That's partly because of the various packages that have nonsense
> like "placed in the public domain under the GPL".)

Wow, do you have a reference for that one? I'd love ot use it as an
example if I give my rise and fall of copyleft talk again...

Indeed, there's an awful lot of cluelessness out there. It was just
about manageable when we had a binary "it's GPLv2 or not" decision to
make. Now, not so much.

> So I would like to suggest one clarification in this line:
>> <p>This essentially places the code into the public domain.
> 
> It seems that
>  This essentially grants the same permissions as placing the code in the 
>  public domain.
> 
> would be more technically correct, since the copyright is not
> disclaimed/waived.

Hmmm. A point. But I'm not sure what the legal difference is. In a lot
of countries you _can't_ disclaim a copyright (and there are
non-copyright authorial rights), but you can grant a blanket license to
the lot saying "do what you like".

Part of what I'm thinking about is I'm floating the idea of pushing for
patent defense for public domain code, and right now the courts are more
functional than the legislature:

  http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#10-04-2014

I dunno if "this is exactly like the public domain except that it isn't"
quite falls under the same umbrella? Public domain is still way simpler
than saying what is and isn't "open source" (the open source definition
has 10 clauses and the version on the OSI website is _annotated_.
They've approved 69 licenses.

I also think that the ongoing license fragmentation is not _healthy_ for
open source development in general. If every project is under its own
license, you can't reuse code. Toybox is full of basic things like
checksum and sha1sum and gunzip implementation that you should just be
able to grab if you need that elsewhere.

I'm trying to get back to "is" or "isn't". I like simple. :)

Even if the law has been FUDded for 30 years, it's easy to define what I
mean: Public domain is where everyone has the same rights as the author.
If the author grants blanket permission retaining no special rights for
themselves, that should do it. All the rights reserved by IP law
expiring would also do it.

"Bottle and sell it" is something authors can do. Hiding authorship is
something authors can do (ala the bitcoin guy). Claiming to _be_ the
author isn't an IP right. It's either a true statement or it isn't.

I think what you're saying is you want attribution, which I agree with.
But plagiarism isn't really a copyright issue, and I can't see a way of
encoding that into a license that doesn't wind up with the "here's a 10
year old project with a 20 page list of bolted together license
statements" problem. (Really that's what BSD was trying to do, and we
got 2-clause, 3-clause, 4-clause, MIT, ISC, and probably GPL
incompatability ala the busybox ping.c with GPL boilerplate at the top
and BSD at the end because they can't remove either one but GPL says no
additional restrictions and BSD says to copy this specific license text
which is only not an additional restriction if you don't look down...)

The best thing for attribution is prominently publishing it on the net
as prior art. I haven't changed the recommendation that each new command
say "Copyright $PERSON <email>" because it's attribution. It's not
because this is the logical person to contact to support the command: I
don't promote something I can't support (or that I think _needs_ support
any time soon) and often I've rewritten it so much the original author
would barely recognize it. The line at the top means "here's the person
who initially did this and deserves credit".)

*shrug* Changing what the web page says doesn't change the license text.
I just miss the days when this was simple.

> It would be my guess that for those who have given in to the FUD, this
> might be slightly less alarming.
> 
> But in reality, I'm only being pedantic.

"You can treat this as a license if you like, but it's functionally
equivalent to placing the code in the public domain."

That's what I was trying to get across. Maybe that's all I need to say?
(That's pretty much what was in the checkin comment changing LICENSE,
way back when...)

> Thanks,
> Isaac Dunham

Rob

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