Problem with Public Domain

The problem with the Public Domain is that in many jurisdictions, it isn't protected.

If the law required that every derivative work of a Public Domain work be itself in the Public Domain, and more importantly that the Source Code of every computer program be available to every one of its users, then there wouldn't be a problem with dedicating stuff to the Public Domain.

But as it stands, in many jurisdictions it's entirely legal to take a PD work, make a derivative work, claim copyright on it and then cage up the Source Code. Which is why we need the GPL: to protect users' freedoms.

Er, no.

You can only claim copyright on the bits you add to a Public Domain work. You don't get to sue people for making *their own* derivative products based on the original Public Domain work.

Just because someone's added a few paragraphs and chapters to, say, Austen's "Pride & Prejudice", it doesn't mean nobody else can use "Pride & Prejudice" as a basis for their own work.

Once a work is in the Public Domain—and in many regions, this has to be done *explicitly*; there's no such concept as "abandonware", for example—IT CANNOT BE COPYRIGHTED AGAIN. Ever. The end.

The BBC is *famous* for recycling old Public Domain works, for f*ck's sake. It's not rocket science. The BBC's own *adaptation* of "Pride & Prejudice" is copyrighted to them, but *the original work remains in the Public Domain*.

How the hell do you think the Gutenberg Project has survived for so long?

Source code is just words on a screen. It's subject to copyright like any other written work. There is no need for additional licensing bollocks. The GPLs are all about credit and attaching strings to what are supposed to be *gifts*. GNU and FSF are founded on the assumption that everyone is guilty of being a thieving bastard. Nice.

Oh please.

I've pointed out in my earlier reply that Public Domain has been around for *generations*. Far, far longer than you or I have even been alive. So... please feel free to cite any examples of the behaviour you claim is so rampant.

Releasing software into the Public Domain was commonplace in the 1980s. Ask anyone who ever owned a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST.

You seem to be claiming that the entire Fred Fish PD library of Amiga software didn't happen because it was an impossibility. It happened. You are wrong. QED.

And I have no idea what the hell makes you think I'm a Microsoft fanboy. I've been involved in the IT sector since the early '80s and have used more—and far more innovative—operating systems over the decades than you've probably had hot dinners. I hate all the current operating systems with a passion the depth of which you cannot even begin to conceive.

I use OS X. Apple's holistic design philosophy fits my own views on the subject better than any of the competitors. So that's your Microsoft fanboy ad-hominem disproved too.

Enough.

1980s Public Domain software

And where's all this amazing software now, that was released into the Public Domain in the 1980s?

Answer, it's scattered to the four winds.

If there are any machines still left around in lofts and backs of wardrobes that can read the weirdy format discs, they will be full of arcane pre-compiled binaries, and they will need an emulator to be usable at all. The Source Code -- the one thing that would be needed to do anything useful with this software, like run it natively on a modern machine and make improvements to it to reflect how times have changed (for instance, telephone numbers are are 11 digits long since 1994, not 10) -- is long gone.

What a waste.

Re: Oh please.

"I've pointed out in my earlier reply that Public Domain has been around for *generations*. Far, far longer than you or I have even been alive. So... please feel free to cite any examples of the behaviour you claim is so rampant."

Although it's not as permissive as public domain code, it is widely known that Microsoft have incorporated BSD-licensed code in Windows and other products, and you won't get to see the sources of the derived works. Given that Microsoft actually have to preserve the copyright and licensing notices (or get sued for copyright infringement), at least we have a record of that behaviour - with public domain code, there need not be any such record.

"Releasing software into the Public Domain was commonplace in the 1980s. Ask anyone who ever owned a Commodore Amiga or Atari ST."

So? In the microcomputer era, most thinking about sharing software was done in terms that are very unsophisticated by today's standards, which is why in the backwaters of the surviving niche platforms (and in the retro scene) some people have difficulty thinking about anything other than "commercial software", "shareware", "freeware" and "public domain" even today. And when people released stuff as "public domain", quite often the source code didn't come with it, so there was no notion of the sustainability that distribution of the sources gives the recipient - it was all "free as in gratis" and "we're not paying for anything", except when you were paying some library for their oh so expensive effort of compiling yet another volume of stuff they'd found on Usenet or some BBS and shovelling it out to everyone without a net or dial-up connection.

That you parade the usual flawed argument about a specific notion of freedom and accuse the FSF of being dishonest, apparently without having read any of their motivations which explain which kind of freedom they seek to guarantee, is evidence enough that all you bring to this discussion is a lack of insight into the legitimate goals of copyleft-style software licensing, a lack of understanding as to why such goals might be useful for people (which is very pertinent to that microcomputer crowd and the abandoned proprietary software that haunts their now-legacy data), ignorance of what the FSF's licensing achievements actually are (hint: the most popular FOSS licence is the GPL), ignorance of the breadth of GNU and copyleft-licensed software, and a complete lack of comprehension that people might not be cranking out stuff specifically for you to use as if it were your own.

Particularly this latter point should shine quite some light on your "entitlement" rhetoric. Next time you (or your corporate sweetheart, Apple) lament the lack of stuff to shove under the hood of something, in order to be able to weld it shut and ship binaries to end-users on an upgrade treadmill, you might want to get a sense of self-reflection and, well, reflect on that.

Actually,,,

Firefox has supported HTML5, specifically video, since 3.5. Get your facts right.

Agreed, I also think that ...

Google may have made a mistake by buying this company. Unless they have planned to Open Source the codec. It is my belief that if they don't open source the codec that they will be in such a strong, dominant, position regarding control of the WWW/Internet ( they are building their own, aren't they/) that they will be easily able to suppress any technology or competing software very easily.

Smiley face because I think Google will open source this.

re: Theora is nothing but small web video

Interesting info, but isn' t that maximum length just a parameter that could easily be tweaked? Might require a new version of the bitstream ("Theora V2") , but not a fundamental re-write.

Oh please.

Google have also given plenty of code *back* to the community, as specified in the conditions of the GPL (etc.) licenses. What the f*ck more do you want? Money?

Either you're giving your code away and letting others use it on the conditions you have set out, or you're not. Which is it?

If you were grocery shop, would you constantly remind me how you're saving me from starvation by *selling* me groceries? "Morning Mr. B! Still not dead of hunger, I see! How about giving me some money to keep my shop going! After all, I sold you some apples yesterday, so you had something to eat and didn't die! Oh! Leaving so soon? YOU EVIL MAN!"

Get it now? If you didn't want to give your bloody code away, why did you slap a GPL license on it and claim it was "free"?

Google *USES* open-source software

"Google made all their own software and didn't use a single piece of existing open source software to help create their empire."

Not so! Google servers famously run Linux, which they could customize to better serve their empire, and using it also saves them from paying OS license fees based on their humongous CPU count...