Re: DEP5: Public domain works
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> Le Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 09:24:30AM -0500, Michael Terry a écrit :
>> The current situation means that public domain files are not likely to
>> be recognizable in a machine-readable way.
> This is a good point and I realise that the thread started in August by
> Colin Watson ended witout a conclusion.
> http://lists.debian.org/20100802152823.GJ21862@riva.ucam.org
> Public domain is of course not a license, but you point at a potential
> benefit in using the License field to record that a work is in the
> public domain.
> Perhaps the producers and consumers of that information could comment on
> whether they think is worth considering to modify the DEP at that stage.
I'm happy to see public domain added as a license keyword. (I'd rather
the keyword be something like public-domain, not PD, but that's somewhat
bikeshed painting.) I think the subsequent lines of the License field in
that case should be the justification for why the file is in the public
domain (US government work, out of copyright, what have you).
However, the caveat is that we maybe should say something about not using
the public-domain keyword for things that aren't actually in the public
domain but just have a license saying "this is in the public domain" or
"you can treat this as if it's in the public domain," since in many
countries that use Debian those works are *not* in the public domain.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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