Licensing

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Steve Bertrand <steve at ibctech.ca> wrote:

> I've got a question that is likely not suited for this list, but I know
> that there are people here who can guide me off-list.
>
> Being a network engineer, I'm far from a developer. With that said, I've
> written numerous network automation programs (mostly in Perl), and have
> developed several small patches for software written in C related to ISP
> operations (including the OS itself).
>
> I'm looking for advice on how I can take all of my code, and license it
> into the public domain. I'm sure that most people won't have any
> interest in it, but I really want to ensure that what I have done is
> freely accessible.
>
> All of my code is pretty well separated into different files that
> contain different functions, so isolating portions of my programs that
> use modules or functions that are external is not a problem.
>
> GPL seems too verbose legally for me. Can the BSD license fit into any
> code, no matter what language it is in, and if so, can I have my code
> overlooked by someone who can verify that the BSD license will fit?
>
> Steve
>
>

Dear Steve ,

You may inspect the following pages and links in them :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_software_licenses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_by_license
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_licenses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_distribution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain

I am not a lawyer and I can not comment on your possible decisions .
My suggestion would be to study related laws in your country before
making software available to public because some companies may not allow
employees
to disclose any software whether they write themselves without getting any
support form their employers  .

There is no any relationship between programming language used and the
license kind selected .
License is the terms of use of the disclosed sources by the others .

Another concept is Copyrights .  You can only license a source  which its
copyright is exactly belongs to you  .  In some countries  specifying  a
copyright  on a  work actually  copyrighted  by  another   entity  may
induce  a  legal penalty .

For me , the best license is BSD-style licenses because recipients of
software
may use them in open and closed source applications . Since licenses like
GPL and LGPL Version 3 requires disclosure of linked main programs , they
can not be used in closed source applications .
Therefore , any commercial entity can not use them and would NOT support
them .

Thank you very much .

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk