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DJB Releases All Source to Public Domain
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?"
How is it confusing?
The restrictions are essentially closing loopholes whereby people could either avoid sharing or share something useless.
Under GPLv2, you could create a derivative work and run a website based on it, but not share the changes since you weren't technically distributing the software. Or you could create a signed binary, and hardware that won't run it unless that binary is exactly the same. Or you could patent some procedure used, so that people can see the source code, but if they do anything with it, they violate your patent.
All GPLv3 does is enforce the spirit of GPLv2. Specifically: Everyone has to be able to get the source code, make any change they want, recompile, and run the modified binary.
If you're getting hit with these restrictions, chances are, you, yourself, are an "indian giver" -- you want to pretend to share, except, not really.
Or GPLv2... or BSD... or Apache... or MIT...
You're suggesting that GPLv3 somehow "infected" GPLv2, or every other license out there. That's simply not true. While public domain is perhaps the only way to ensure your code can be included in any kind of project, I see nothing wrong with share alike, and I see no reason why closing the loopholes is "going too far".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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 :-)
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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