OT - Closing Off An Open-Source Product

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "DL" == Dave LeBlanc <whisper at oz.net> writes:

    DL> Of course, these days, you get the gov't to pay for the work
    DL> and then you get the benefit...

When I worked for the federal government in the 1980's, I wrote and
gave away a lot of free (as in beer) software.  We were always told to
add a standard blurb that said something to the effect that the code
was "not subject to copyright", which I always took to have some
quasi-legal standing between public domain and do-what-you-want-with-
it-but-remember-you-can't-sue-us-'cause-we're-the-feds.

The justification was that since the American taxpayer was paying for
the development of the software, it was owned by the US citizenry and
could not be copyrighted.  Back then though, the number of people that
cared about free software licenses probably numbered in single digits.

-Barry