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Comment by natfriedman | Hacker News Reader

Under section 105 of the US Copyright Act, works produced by the US government are not entitled to domestic copyright protection and are therefore, essentially, public domain.

IANAL but we've been down this road with the license on the White House flickr feed.

Apparently this does not apply to contractors - which I find rather inconsistent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the...

Of course, whether the government actually publishes those works or not is an entirely separate question. So it's great to see this happening.

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But they're derivative works of Drupal, which is GPLv2: http://drupal.org/licensing/faq

So maybe that means they can't write code for Drupal?

The contractor clause is because of the military.

But it sure comes in handy for other stuff.

If the contractor clause is not applicable to this work even releasing it under the GPL is questionable, because that's most decidedly not the same as releasing it to the public domain.

Still, it’s the sort of unforseen problem you want to have.

I'm not sure they have the choice about whether or not to GPL it. They are building on GPL'd code, which means their code must be GPL'd. Perhaps there's a formal way to say, "we won't go after you if you use our code against the terms of the GPL, but we can't control what Drupal does".

or they can't use GPL software because of the license....

They really need to obey the law and should have an actual statement about how this works.

> Under section 105 of the US Copyright Act, works produced by the US government are not entitled to domestic copyright protection and are therefore, essentially, public domain.

What if the works are derivative of works licensed under the GPL?

I would suppose the diff is public domain while the original retains its protection.

Otherwise, every document produced by the US government derived from another document would put the original under public domain.

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