Pascal Bourguignon  <spam@thalassa.informatimago.com> wrote:
+---------------
| You cannot put your own copyright on public domain software, so you
| have no right to change the 'license' of public domain knowledge, but
| you can still package and sell it as you want.
+---------------

Actually, that's not true. (...at least, not in the U.S.) In fact, if
I recall the story correctly, that's precisely what started everyone
slapping copyrights on their open-source software back in the early
BSD days -- somebody took a public-domain editor, made a few small
changes, copyrighted it, then started suing people who were still
distributing the original public-domain version for violating their
copyright! At which point, a bunch of outraged people who had been
dedicating their software to the public domain began using modified
BSD copyrights instead. [The GPL came quite a bit later...]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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