RE: Re: US Govt Licensing (was licensing)

Ok lets see where we are here.  BTW the Canadian Government CAN =
copyright stuff so we are talking about our 'merican neighbours.

1) Pure public domain is probably a GPL compatible licence.  It has no =
restrictions on further use, so one should be able to include public =
domain code in a GPL project on about the same level of difficulty as =
one needs to incorporate BSD code.  To be really clear you probably =
should document where the code came from if possible.

2) US Government developed and published code is like public domain =
EXCEPT that the one cannot charge the US government for the code.  =
Technically that could be seen as an additional restriction under the =
GPL, as it means that you effectively should be offering the US =
government a better price than anyone else for your software if it =
contains some USG code.  However since the deal is going to be with the =
Gov't anyway, and your price will probably be lower to meet other =
requirements (I don't know about the US , but in Canada their used to be =
a clause that you had to sell at your best price to the Canadian Gov.  =
The practical implication may not be all that great as long as the fact =
is documented.

SElinux is a Government developed "overlay" on a GPL base.  The base is =
GPL so must be distributed as such.  If you could extract just the =
changes they would be "government developed" but the whole is GPL.  (and =
any US agency is not going to fool around if they have an official need =
for that stuff- they will get a disk in a double wrapping directly from =
NSA.

The total effect is that the legal services have some interesting issues =
to consider, but overall, if you can get US government software =
published in the first place for most purposes we can consider it as =
"open source" I would guess.  IANAL - specially a 'merican one.