Re: Public domain and DEP-5-compliant debian/copyright
>> Rather, I think such a declaration is not established to be an effective
>> divestment of copyright in all the jurisdictions where Debian recipients
>> operate, and the risk to them is unacceptable —
In addition to what Ian said, Debian already accepts Public Domain
software, even though public domain is completely meaningless in some
jurisdictions.
> Are you aware of _any_ case where a piece of software was released
> with a statement from its copyrightholders saying it was "public
> domain", but where later the copyrightholders reneged on the implied
> permissions ?
>
> Note that even copyrightholders who use proper Free copyright licences
> sometimes make legally unfounded claims against us or our downstreams.
> Empirically I would be very surprised if the risk from legally-naive
> copyrightholders, who try to `put things in the public domain', was
> greater than the risk from copyrightholders who issue proper licences.
>
> We're not talking about a situation where the whole thing might be a
> deliberate trap. If someone like IBM or Oracle came out with a
> `public domain' statement we should be very suspicious - but that's
> not (ever) what we're dealing with.
>
> And all of this is before we get into questions of estoppel (or its
> equivalent in various jurisdictions).
Theoretically, this could fail the "Tentacles of Evil" test. Although I
think that the estoppel defense would be enough to stop this.
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