I'm not a lawyer either

On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 00:48, Lex Spoon wrote:
> If you use MIT/X (or GPL or any
> other license) you give up a big advantage of public domain: it's
> rock-solid established law that is codified internationally by the Berne
> convention.
and at least two big disadvantages:

1. it's not possible to drop ownership in every jurisdiction, so an
author
keeps both rights and responsibilities related to the publication (incl.
the
exclusive right of distribution), so you effectively rule out
development in
certain countries - as those developers would keep their whole set of
exclusive
rights if they don't use a license.
2. if you can drop your rights, you don't disclaim warranty of any kind
(as that would be a license again - you're restricting the user's right
to 
sue you), making it harder to avoid legal trouble.

unless all development is anonymous (making it impossible to relate the
code to you),
one of these scenarios might be able to get you - basically all open
source licenses
(and a good share of the closed ones, too) contain the "no warranty for
the fitness for
any purpose" boilerplate - public domain does not.


> I don't know why it is claimed that GPL and BSD are interoperable.  You
> cannot link code together that was written under these licenses,
> correct?  You can (*with limits*) have them talk over sockets, but that
bsd without advertising (the one in active use) can be linked with gpl
code,
the result would have to follow the rules of the gpl (as the bsd's
license
terms are a subset of the gpl's terms)

> is true for just about any pair of open source licenses.  Usually when
> people say that licenses are interoperable, it means that you can take
> code from one program and copy-paste it into the other.  That is not the
> case with GPL and any non-GPL license.  This is why Mozilla is now
> released under both Mozilla-L and GPL; you can take the GPL option if
> you want to intermix Mozilla code with GPL code.
the GPL is indeed incompatible to the MPL (and most if not all
derivatives), but
there are several licenses (the BSD w/o adv., zlib, png, mit, x license
family
among them) that it's compatible to.

that's mostly a problem/feature of the gpl (there are many licenses that
don't care
about the environment you put the code in), not of licensing in general:
the gpl requires that all of its restrictions are abided by, and one of
those restrictions
is that you don't add any more restrictions - so the only licenses it's
compatible to are
those that are subsets of the terms of the gpl (and don't have the "no
more restrictions" rule
themselves, of course).


patrick mauritz