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1) It's not a "legally castrated copyright", it's a tool that we use to enforce a behavioral pattern that encourages growth of the commons.

2) Why should we feel "happy" when you've pulled a bait-and-switch, and acted as a bully? Your behavior and mindset are grossly at odds with the purpose of open source. Your effort was a trojan horse that's disruptive to the community. In short: You literally missed the point of "open source" entirely.

3) You explicitly stated that the algorithm is "not in the public domain", so falling back to a position that one can merely use Metaphone3.java is disingenuous. Java source is not useful or suitable to those of us in the Ruby world. We don't want to have to deal with the added overhead of a JVM.

4) Don't expect to be welcomed when you act like a bully, because you didn't know what the hell you were doing. It's not our job to teach you what the BSD license means, or what the difference between a copyright and a patent is.

5) Don't let the door hit you on the butt on your way out!

would you say that you are representative of the type of person i would tend to encounter in your ruby open source community?

No, they're vastly friendlier, by and large -- as demonstrated by the project maintainer of text being nice acceding to your demands despite having precisely zero legal obligation to do so, and despite you being an utter jackass about it.

I, on the other hand, am seriously considering taking Metaphone3.java and reimplenting it in several languages, then making those publicly available.

if you have any questions or comments about the code or algorithm, my email address can be found on my company website

Oh, hey you're in the thread. You're really confusing matters by using the term "Public Domain" in a way that really doesn't mean what you are trying to say (though I'm not at all sure what that would be). Please see the post I made elsewhere in this discussion that may clear up matters a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792829

(FYI, when I speak of "rights" in this post, I mean "legal rights", which I personally distinguish from the ethical ideas of "right" and "wrong"--I'm just explaining legality, there is no "ought" in what I say here)

> What I was not aware of is that the copyright notice required by BSD is useful only in asserting the right of the copyright owner to swear away virtually all of the protections normally granted by a copyright notice. It is a legally castrated copyright.

Um, what did you think a license would do? That last sentence, it's pretty much exactly the definition of what a copyright license does (if a little strongly worded).

Copyright is automatic. It only affects works (in your case, written code), not ideas (such as algorithms). You start out with all these rights about copying, distributing and broadcasting that particular work. These rights are exclusive, they belong only to you. That is default copyright, when you don't license anything.

Indeed exactly what a license does, is "castrating" (if you will) your copyrights. You can (partially) grant these rights to others, under certain circumstances, thereby diminishing the value of your own exclusive rights. That's what it does, a license defines under what circumstances you give up your right to exercise your copyrights, with respect to other people.

You start out with full exclusive rights, and a license formalizes how much and under what circumstances you are willing to chip away those rights and share.

Yet again, I must stress, copyright only applies to a "work"--a legal term, in this case referring to the written code of your project, and in general specifically not referring to ideas.

Thank you for your explanations. Actually, I understand the difference between copyright and patent very well thank you, and i also understand what public domain means. Unfortunately a number of people have misunderstood me to think that i asserted that copyrights protect algorithms.

> Well, I am sorry to have misunderstood the fact that a BSD license swears away any rights of control. In practice it turns out to be nearly indistinguishable from Public Domain, so what's the point? Let's just call it Public Domain and quit pussyfooting around.

Yes. BSD is pretty close to public domain. That's what it's for.