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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?"

1 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In a word... by rsidd · · Score: 1, Troll

    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.

    You can define things as you like, as Humpty Dumpty did, but the idea of "Free Software" was invented by Richard Stallman and is mainly used by his Free Software Foundation, and most people would accept their view. (Search that page for "public domain"; the BSD and MIT licences also come close to "letting you do whatever you wanted.") And most of those who don't accept that view would go with "free as in beer." You would find hardly any takers for your view.