[Toybox] license.html page update.

[Isaac Dunham]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 08:54:58PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> 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.

If I recall correctly, the last time I've seen it was looking at the
xspread source.
(Xspread is a GPLv2 spreadsheet that basically amounts to the od public
domain sc spreadsheet, plus an X11 gui. It was written in the 90s and
has not been touched since.)

But I've seen it a number of times. Look up "public domain under GPL" on
Google, and you'll get about 15,500 hits. There's 11,100 hits for
"public domain under the GPL," though some of those are people pushing
back against this usage.
 
> > 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".

IANAL, but my understanding is that it's only in the public domain if
there is no copyright, so in those countries you cannot release anything
into the public domain.


<snip>
> 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.

No, I'm just saying that if you're not disclaiming copyright, it's not
*technically* public domain.
In other words, I'm being pedantic; don't read anything into it, because
there is nothing else to it.
And there's a microscopic chance that there might be one or two companies
who would care about pedantry like this.

But since you mention it, *I* don't care about attribution or copyright 
for what I've written. If the cpio code I wrote were to end up in sbase, 
or resolve_modalias ended up in lazy-utils, or someone grabbed hwrs,
lspci, or acpi, *I* wouldn't care if they removed any mention of me.
I got my use out of it already:
writing it was the whole point of everything but cpio, acpi, and hwrs,
and those were also written for the sake of using it.
I didn't write anything for the sake of a copyright or attribution, just
for amusement and use.
If by some strange chance, Microsoft were to use my cpio code under a
proprietary license without mentioning it, it would not make a difference
in the fact that I wrote something that I can use to generate an initrd,
and released it.

<snip>
> *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...)

Sure. My point had been that it was equivalent rather than equal.
But however you wish to phrase it.

> > Thanks,
> > Isaac Dunham
> 
> Rob

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham

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