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DJB Releases All Source to Public Domain

Posted by Zonk on from the play-freebird dept.

A Sage Developer writes "During a recent conference, Sage Days 6, Dan Bernstein (who has recently come under attack for his licensing policy) was among the invited speakers. During a panel discussion on the future of open source mathematics software, Bernstein declared that all of his past and future code would be released to the public domain. This includes qmail, primegen, and a number of other projects. Given the headache that incompatibility between GPLv3 and GPLv2 is causing developers, will we see more of this?"

2 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In a word... by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Agreed that Public Domain is not incompatible with Open Source. In fact, it isn't incompatible, in terms of absorbing the code into a project, with the GPL. However, in terms of Free Software, Free doesn't mean "a free exchange of ideas and code that let you do what ever you wanted with it", but rather a limit on distribution rights for the purpose of ensuring that user rights always remain free. And it seems to work :-)

  2. Re:In a word... by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The only restriction the GPL imposes is that you can't restrict the freedoms of the user. It's like a double negative, restricting restrictions makes it more free.

    You may call this a convoluted ideology, but the fact is if I receive a program with GPL code in it, I'm free to modify it as I see fit. If I receive a program with public domain code in it, I may not be able to modify it at all.

    I'm interested in a free exchange of code that lets me do whatever I want with it. Public domain does not do that for me.

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