On 7/18/17 11:39 AM, phil(a)reseau-libre.net wrote:
Hi All,
I'm sending you that little e-mail because i'm confronted to a
specific license constraint while i have to declare my personal work
as i'm working for French government.
My manager told me that in France i can't declare my contribution as
being in the public domain as the french civil code doesn't permit an
author to completely loose all the copyright of a given content (not
for the public domain, which can be reach only after years).
What is possible is to use a very permissive license such as BSD-2
clause license for my work.
Do you think, as it's already done for some of the SSG files
copyrighted by Red-Hat, to set a BSD-2 clause copyright to the Debian/
and Ubuntu/ dir ? Maybe reducing them to the lonely content i write
(and not the whole dir content, which contains files that have also be
written by others) would be better ?
SSG is Public Domain because of original co-sponsorship from the US
Government (specifically, NSA). In the US, Government employees and
contractors have no claims to intellectual property and must use public
domain. Over time, Public Domain has accelerated contributions from
other US Gov agencies and contractors (Lockheed, Northrup, etc) because
they don't need special approvals to collaborate.
I'm not sure how dual-licensing content (RHEL vs Deb) would work for
downstream releases in RHEL(+derivatives) and Ubuntu. Can packages be
dual licensed?
p.s. while OpenSCAP tooling is LGPL [0], SSG is entirely Public Domain
[1]. This has caused some issues in the past when proprietary companies
took SSG and re-branded as their own content.... so there is definite
interest in licensing to something that requires attribution.
Martin: This has come up before, and you suggested there was a Public
Domain variant that is more acceptable to the international community?
Alternatively, could the Creative Commons licensing work? e.g.
-
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Public_domain
-
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0
[0]
https://github.com/OpenSCAP/openscap/blob/maint-1.2/COPYING
[1]
https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/blob/master/LICENSE