Re: US Govt Licensing (was licensing)

Jan C. Depner wrote:
> It's really pretty simple.  If I write something for the government and
> publish it, you can use it any way you want except that the parts that
> were written for the government cannot be copyrighted.  You can
> copyright a work that includes government code but you must explicitly
> state that the government code is public domain.  We do buy enhanced
> versions of our software but it is illegal to charge us for the
> government code.  We just went through a song and dance with a company
> that is using a ton of code that I wrote where we had to quantify what
> our part was worth.  Since the enhancements only have a subjective value
> you can pretty much charge what you can get away with though ;-)
> 
> Jan
> 
So, if you can charge what you want, you can enhance it, and
GPL the enhancements.  Since the government is not actually
paying for the GPL'd version, they won't have any problem
using it.  If your enhancements are valuable enough, people
will prefer the GPL'd code to the original public domain code.

I'm mostly asking this as an exercise concerning the FSF argument
against public domain code.  The FSF argument is that companies can
take public domain code private by making enhancements, and
selling them without releasing the code for them.  But I always
thought that the original version would remain in the public
domain, so the starting point is the same for everyone.  The
only reason the closed source code might be more attractive is
that it is somehow more useful.  The closed nature of the code
is not really at issue, and they could virally open source
their enhancements as well, with the GPL.  (Personally, I am
in favor of the viral nature of the GPL, but not everyone
is, and RMS apparently hates that characterization of it.)
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Bill White                 [email protected]
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