Good morning, my name is Cem Karan. I am the person that wrote the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Software Release Process for Unrestricted Release (https://github.com/USArmyResearchLab/ARL-Open-Source-Guidance-and-Instructions). I have been in discussion with the Open Source Initiative (OSI, https://opensource.org/) on their license-discuss mailing list to develop a method that ARL can use to safely and legally release ARL-developed code as Open Source. Marc Jones suggested on that list that I contact Debian to see what Debian thoughts are. The background: most works produced by the US Government (USG) do not have copyright attached. As a result, ARL's lawyers believe that licenses that rely on copyright (e.g., Apache 2.0, GPL, etc.) could be challenged in court, and declared invalid in toto, which means that the provisions of the licenses that deal with warranty, liability, patent issues, etc. would all of a sudden become unenforceable. To get around that, we'd like to use a scheme that was suggested on code.mil: 1) All code that does not have copyright attached is released under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). 2) ARL-controlled projects choose an OSI-approved license to accept contributions under (e.g. Apache 2.0). If a contribution has copyright attached, then the contributors must license the contribution under the OSI-approved license to the ARL. Contributions that have no copyright attached must be licensed to the ARL under CC0. 3) The works are combined and distributed with a note similar to the following: "The portions of this work that do not have copyright attached are distributed under the CC0 license. The portions of this work that have copyright attached are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license." Will this scheme meet Debian's idea of Open Source software? Thanks, Cem Karan
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