On Sun, Sep 16, 2001 at 05:55:59PM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote: > yes public domain essentially gives all possible rights with no > restrictions. I keep hearing, though I have not had the opportunity to verify this with a Real Lawyer(tm), that public domain has one drawback; you can't attach a no-warranty statement to it. It is apparently extremely important to have a statement like this: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL <foo> BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. ...at least in the United States. Else you risk getting sued when the stuff breaks. To that end, we might want to recommend the MIT or equivalent 2-clause form of the BSD license as the minimum recommended license terms for anything where authorship is actually known. Comments? -- G. Branden Robinson | Kissing girls is a goodness. It is Debian GNU/Linux | a growing closer. It beats the branden@debian.org | hell out of card games. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Robert Heinlein
Attachment:
pgphdZkpUge2z.pgp
Description: PGP signature