| Jeff Abrahamson on 17 Jun 2004 14:17:02 -0000 |
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This is soap-boxish: I have become frustrated with the amount of code on the web that has no explicit license attached to it. Most often this appears in code that people post in email messages that then become archived. It is frustrating because I suspect that the people who post it are often fine with someone else using their code, but, in the absence of their saying so, I can't use it in anything I intend to release. I also see this a lot in universities, where people somehow assume that it doesn't matter. So I've begun asking people to put a statement of copyright (or disclaimer of copyright) and an indication of license on everything they write and reveal in any fashion to the public. I probably don't do this fully consistently myself, but I thought I'd share this in the hopes that others might start doing this, too. The problem, of course, is that copyright law in most countries is now so restrictive that the moment you doodle something on a napkin, you own it, you have copyright, and no one may use what you doodled without your explicit permission. Nice if you are working for profit, but society is built on top of the past works of others, and not all of those works deserve to be kept in a lock box for a century for lack of licensing terms. (Of course, I'd prefer that people indicate a GPL-compatible license or release to the public domain, but mostly I'd like to encourage people to just be clear.) [Jeff steps off his soap-box now and returns to productive work.] -- Jeff Jeff Abrahamson <http://www.purple.com/jeff/> GPG fingerprint: 1A1A BA95 D082 A558 A276 63C6 16BF 8C4C 0D1D AE4B A cool book of games, highly worth checking out: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931686963/purple-20 Attachment:
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