On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:00:39PM -0500, Pamela Chestek wrote:
I'm assuming what you mean to happen after the limited term is
that
there is some effort to have the work enter a quasi-public domain
status. The Founders Copyright has a licensing vehicle that it uses to
mimic the public domain -- did you have something similar in mind?
Not similar in the details, but rather what I was envisioning was the
license becoming noncopyleft after a certain number of years.
Assuming you set a 30 year term, would it be ok for the
early parts of Linux to enter the public domain in 10 years?
I was hoping Ted Ts'o might chime in. :)
Which
brings up practical problems; it's active code that has creation dates
spread over 20 years. Would you have to figure out what drops and what
doesn't (which I suppose is an existing problem anyway, but one we'll
confront much later)?
It wouldn't seem to be a problem in that respect, because it would be
like the use of BSD-licensed code within otherwise-GPL'd Linux.
Perhaps you can elaborate more on why in your $DAYJOB situation the
license made your task more difficult?
It was just to note the annoyance of having to deal with an issue
concerning code published in 1979.
- RF