[sclug] Pirate Party UK and Free software

[John Stumbles]

mail at europa.demon.co.uk wrote:

> ... we are presently considering the next best thing, a longer
> copyright for releasing source code (and... for verification, that
> means anyone could try compiling it, see whether it was obfuscated,
> etc, though possibly not able to redistribute commercially without
> licensing it).

Am I missing something? What is the problem in having a policy that 
implements a sort of thermodynamic principle, that any work should carry 
sort of vestigial copy rights even after normal 'copyright' has expired, 
and that this special rights property would allow the work to be 
incorporated in a work protected by a copyright that is a more 
permissive superset of the original copyright but not in one that's less 
permissive.

Thus an out-of-copyright GPL-ish work could be incorporated into a 
binary-only work that was released as pure public domain but not into a 
binary-only product protected by a restrictive copyright. Depending on 
the original FLOSS licence it could be incorporated into a proprietary 
work released with source if the original licence would have permitted it.

-- 
John Stumbles                                       http://yaph.org.uk
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