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Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Releasing under an extremely permissive lic

Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Releasing under an extremely permissive license does not relinquish copyright. Any future derived work by the author would still be unambiguously licensable under any conditions they see fit.

skissane 5y ago
> Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Isn't that just the normal case of a derived work? If you modify a public domain work, you don't have copyright on the parts which are identical to the public domain original, but you do have it on any non-trivial modifications/additions, and you can license the later (whether under an open source or proprietary license). A real world example is the Ghidra reverse engineering suite - it was originally written by US government employees in the course of their employment, and as such that original code is ineligible for copyright in the United States and automatically in the public domain in the US (although its legal status in non-US jurisdictions is rather more complex, variable, and at times even unsettled), and hence cannot be released under an open source license (or any other copyright license for that matter). But, they also accept outside contributions, which generally would be under copyright (whether by the contributor or their employer), and it is a condition of accepting those contributions that the contributor agrees to license them under the Apache 2 license. Hence, Ghidra is an amalgam of public domain code (or at least, public domain in the US) and copyrighted code licensed under Apache 2. I'm not aware this causes any problems in practice.
- deadbeeves 5y ago
  That seems pretty strange to me. Even if the contributions by themselves are not PD, they're inextricably linked to a PD work in a way that makes them lose meaning when removed from it. And they're still being incorporated into the work by a government employee, which means that the work as a whole must still be PD, even though small parts of it might not be.

skissane 5y ago

> Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Isn't that just the normal case of a derived work? If you modify a public domain work, you don't have copyright on the parts which are identical to the public domain original, but you do have it on any non-trivial modifications/additions, and you can license the later (whether under an open source or proprietary license). A real world example is the Ghidra reverse engineering suite - it was originally written by US government employees in the course of their employment, and as such that original code is ineligible for copyright in the United States and automatically in the public domain in the US (although its legal status in non-US jurisdictions is rather more complex, variable, and at times even unsettled), and hence cannot be released under an open source license (or any other copyright license for that matter). But, they also accept outside contributions, which generally would be under copyright (whether by the contributor or their employer), and it is a condition of accepting those contributions that the contributor agrees to license them under the Apache 2 license. Hence, Ghidra is an amalgam of public domain code (or at least, public domain in the US) and copyrighted code licensed under Apache 2. I'm not aware this causes any problems in practice.

deadbeeves 5y ago
That seems pretty strange to me. Even if the contributions by themselves are not PD, they're inextricably linked to a PD work in a way that makes them lose meaning when removed from it. And they're still being incorporated into the work by a government employee, which means that the work as a whole must still be PD, even though small parts of it might not be.