Re: Public Domain

[David Ghandehari <iffy@uclink4.berkeley.edu>]

Michael Maher wrote:
> > Public domain means that the owners give up all claim to the
> > copyright.  It would be perfectly legal for me to take all
> > the code they release, change nothing, and then re-release
> > it under the GPL.
> 
> That is not true.  A good example would be Borland's Turbo
> Vision.  It's 'Public Domain' with stipulations.  You can
> build against it, and distribute binaries only.  You can
> distribute source, but not theirs.  It's stupid.

When something is bequeathed to the Public Domain, it means that
EVERYONE owns it.  It is public property.  You can take something in the
public domain, say, the works of Beethoven, and change it, use it,
distribute it however you like, and you never have to answer to anyone,
ever.  The estate of Beethoven can't come up and say, "Okay, you need to
pay me for using my ancestor's works now."

Public Domain isn't a license, it's the ABSENCE of a license.  Licenses
like GPL and BSD are MUCH more restrictive.  They are also not public
domain.  The example you cite is not Public Domain, no matter what they
like to call it.

You can copyright a work that contains public domain code, but it
doesn't prevent someone else from legally doing something similar with
the same code.  You own any changes you make to the code.  Etc, etc...

It's not something to fear, but it doesn't assure that derived works
will be open-source, like GPL and LGPL do.

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