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A comment on SF Mayor on why open source is the new software policy in San Francisco. Parent comment

Re:SF Mayor on why open source is the new software policy in... by jcl on Friday January 22, 2010 @01:15PM (#1070269)
GPL is not a "type of copyright"; it's a license that derives its power from copyright. The same is true of pretty much any license that tries to limit what you can do -- which includes most open source licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache).

There are also open source "licenses" that essentially place the code in the public domain. These are the only ones that fit the article's description.

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Re:SF Mayor on why open source is the new software policy in... by LogicHoleFlaw on Friday January 22, 2010 @02:38PM (#1070477)
Unfortunately the public domain concept is not recognized in all countries. If you wish for your software to be truly available in these nations you will still need to apply some sort of copyright license, no matter how liberal.
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Re:SF Mayor on why open source is the new software policy in... by nzmsv on Friday January 22, 2010 @03:24PM (#1070585)
Even open-source software has a potential problem in some countries. For example, while OSS is often received free of charge, the government can argue that the user still got an item of value. So they have to pay taxes on this "gift".
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