3 ms·

If someone releases something under the BSD license, how do can you trust him/her? I'm especially suspicious of something like an operating system with its atte

If someone releases something under the BSD license, how do can you trust him/her? I'm especially suspicious of something like an operating system with its attendant functionality, such as the TCP/IP stack. This takes enormous effort to put together. If you are told that it's under the BSD license, then how do you know that this is true and that it would be safe to use it in your code for commercial purposes?

amichail 19y ago
You haven't answered my question.
- randallsquared 19y ago
  I think he has, but to paraphrase: The amount of work put into making the initial copy of something has no bearing on the license. Some people don't care about the amount of work something took, after the fact. The current rights-holder may not have actually done the work. The current rights-holder may have political beliefs that conflict with copyright. Anyway, if you're asking whether you should trust a third party about the license for something, the answer is no. However, you seem to be asking whether you should trust the rights-holder about the license they themselves used, which just seems odd.
  - amichail 19y ago
    I mean maybe the author(s) copied part of the work from something that is not public domain and then claimed wrongly that the result is public domain. In my case, having to change the word list later because it turns out that part of it was copied from a proprietary source would mess up my puzzle.
    - inklesspen 19y ago
      What if you use BSD-licensed code, only it later turns out that the person who added the license wasn't the copyright holder? What if you ask someone if you can have something, and he says yes, but later it turns out it wasn't his to give away? The license is irrelevant; you are worried about people claiming something is under X terms, when it's not. The answer to this is: do your legal due diligence like everyone else. (The only wrinkle is that in some jurisdictions it's not legally possible to put something into the public domain. This does not seem to bother most people.)

amichail 19y ago

You haven't answered my question.

randallsquared 19y ago
I think he has, but to paraphrase: The amount of work put into making the initial copy of something has no bearing on the license. Some people don't care about the amount of work something took, after the fact. The current rights-holder may not have actually done the work. The current rights-holder may have political beliefs that conflict with copyright. Anyway, if you're asking whether you should trust a third party about the license for something, the answer is no. However, you seem to be asking whether you should trust the rights-holder about the license they themselves used, which just seems odd.
- amichail 19y ago
  I mean maybe the author(s) copied part of the work from something that is not public domain and then claimed wrongly that the result is public domain. In my case, having to change the word list later because it turns out that part of it was copied from a proprietary source would mess up my puzzle.
  - inklesspen 19y ago
    What if you use BSD-licensed code, only it later turns out that the person who added the license wasn't the copyright holder? What if you ask someone if you can have something, and he says yes, but later it turns out it wasn't his to give away? The license is irrelevant; you are worried about people claiming something is under X terms, when it's not. The answer to this is: do your legal due diligence like everyone else. (The only wrinkle is that in some jurisdictions it's not legally possible to put something into the public domain. This does not seem to bother most people.)