[Ilugc] [OT] GPL and public domain software license.
- From: ramanraj.k@xxxxxxxxx (Ramanraj K)
- Date: Wed May 3 21:15:25 2006
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
All works enter into the public domain after the statutory period
expires, but if an author desires to immediately place his work in the
public domain, it needs to be done under a license.
If you put it under any kind of license, its not public domain anymore.
In India, under Section 30 of the Copyright Act, the owner of a
copyright may grant any interest in the right by license, and the author
has every right to grant his work to public domain under a license. It
is universally practised and well established by custom too. For
example, John Walker, the author and maintainer of
http://fourmilab.ch/ ;
who has contributed a number of Unix utilities and other articles has
the following text on his site:
"Except for a few clearly-marked exceptions, all the material on
this site is in the public domain and
may be used in any manner without permission, restriction,
attribution, or compensation."
That is a fine example of a simple license with clear terms, placing the
author's work in the public domain relinquishing copyright. A
dedication may be made using more formal terms, like for instance under
the creative commons public domain dedication at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ or
http://www.gjt.org/doc/pd/statement.shtml or merely a short label that
the author has placed his work in the public domain.
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