Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Tuesday, February 01, 2005, at 02:26PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> 
wrote:
>Gottfried Hofmann said:
>> Isn't it commmon among programmers to use public domain code in GPLed
>> programs (which means the public domain code will be relicensed to GPL
>> in that case)?
>
>technically, no computer code has become public domain yet.

As you point out later, pre-1980s code may be PD.

More recent code may be dedicated to the public domain where that is 
possible. 

The FSF ask for copyright to be assigned on code for their projects or, in 
the case of snippets, for the code to be declared PD.

http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html#Copyright-Papers

>Some programmers release their code under a license that
>gives away 99.9% of the rights (BSD license, etc).

The sad thing is that BSD provides a fig-leaf for "just giving something 
away" rather than "keeping it free". AdTI were going to try to spin BSD to be 
a "real" Free Software license and the GPL as a "hybrid". Thank goodness for 
Growklaw.

>But the only way for something to be truly "public domain"
>is for the copyright term to expire. (or if the code was written
>before the 70's to have been published without registration or
>a copyright notice. 

Like UNIX. :-)

- Rob.