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Comment by nakkiel | Hacker News Reader

Well, you wouldn't want to release anything into the public domain and I don't believe any sane developer ever has.

As far as license violations are concerned, this is not a problem solely limited to the BSD as there are oh so many cases for the GPL as well for example.

In my experience, I'm much more keen to include a notice about the folk who wrote that piece of software than complying with the GPL (although I always do). For example, let's say you want to strip down an ERP web-client so that mobile devices can actually use it. That's a quick and dirty 1 hour patch to render the software minimal. If the software is under the GPL, you must publish your changes. Knowing that your dirty patch will be obsolete in a 2 weeks time and that nobody will ever actually look for it.

Well, I'm all for freedom.

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Well, you wouldn't want to release anything into the public domain and I don't believe any sane developer ever has.

That must mean that Tim Berners-Lee, djb, aaronsw and plenty of other good devs are insane. See the list of public domain software and how to handle the 'unlicense license' here:

http://unlicense.org/

(public domain makes a lot of sense and I am considering it for my next project. atm my pref is 3-clause BSD simply for attribution and the no ad policy.)

Well, you wouldn't want to release anything into the public domain and I don't believe any sane developer ever has.

D. Richard Hipp and everyone who has ever contributed to SQLite are insane, in your opinion?

The public domain isn't a terrible choice when thinking about how and if to license your software, and is arguably the only incontestably ethical choice.

I disagree for the simple reason that some countries do not recognize the public domain, so people in those countries cannot use your code at all, without risking legal problems.

I should have made clear that by 'sane' I meant anybody who cared about the responsibility that comes with intellectual property. Can't find the reference, it turns out that by releasing something in the public domain you give way for prosecution in case of bugs and other nasty use of your software.

> If the software is under the GPL, you must publish your changes.

This is only true if you distribute a binary of the patched code. If your patching on the server side there is no requirement to publish your patch (hence why the Affero GPL was invented, it closes this loophole).

This is an important point that I think a lot of people don't understand.

Even respected people in the technology world don't recognize that the GPL is not a use license.

In our case, the 'changes' would be installed on a customer's server in their office.

But you're actually totally right.

There's an interesting lawsuit (still ongoing AFAIK) involving Free, a French DSL provider. They distribute a router (those are referred to as Box in marketing terms in France) with interesting features and based on Linux. They also include many other FOSS.

It turns out they modified parts of those software (I have no idea which exactly) and are being prosecuted based on the fact that their devices, distributed to customers, include those modifications. They argue that they lend the Boxes to customers but those remain their property.

While arguing about the lawsuit with a fellow, I realized he had no idea about what the GPL actually contained.

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