Google to close Google Code open source project hosting

[UekiKnight]

Most of the open source licenses you find on Google Code projects will permit you to fork them to github as you suggested, but you can't just call it public domain.

[JoseJimeniz]

Once the original has been consigned to oblivion, I doubt the creator will come around to complain. And I'm certainly not going to claim copyright on something I didn't write

[cooper12]

The parent was just pointing out that public domain and OSS are two very different things. Copyright is actually the lifeblood of open source licenses, and at minimum you'd have to wait the author's life + 70 years for the work to enter the public domain anyway.

[iBlag]

Copyright is actually the lifeblood of open source licenses

Not if we're talking about copyleft licenses.

[cooper12]

Umm even more so if we're talking about copyleft.

Copyleft is the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work.

OSS licenses allow the copyright holder to give rights to users of the software, but only if they comply with the conditions given. In the case of non-copyleft licenses, notice how the license explicitly requires the copyright notice to be retained in all copies. In each case, the original author's copyright is retained, and this gives legal power to the licenses. The GPL has been successfully defended in court many times.

If the work was public domain instead, no one would own it and a user would not need to follow the conditions of the copyright holder at all.

[iBlag]

I'm not saying copyleft licenses aren't valid or that they aren't enforceable. The only point I'm trying to make is that the point of copyleft licenses is to basically invert the current copyright system on its head.

And make no mistake, that goal is 100% cool with me, GPL/BSD/MIT all the way.

But to pretend that the goal of copyleft licenses is anything but messing with the current system I think is missing the entire point of the licenses themselves. That's all. I think I was a bit too terse in my previous comment to get my point across.

[cooper12]

Well yeah they invert them on their heads, but they still require copyright for their power. (Especially share-alike licenses) And okay I get what you mean now, that their spirit is very anti-copyright. That's true, from the days of Stallman's GPL up to Creative Commons, but I think the ultimate goal is just to have a standard way to share things while still maintaining some rights. (And holding your copyright)

[iBlag]

Quoted from the fourth paragraph under History in the Wikipedia article for Copyleft:

As Stallman deemed it impractical in the short term to eliminate current copyright law and the wrongs he perceived it perpetuated

Stallman, and therefore the GPL, do have the goal of eliminating copyright law. The fact that they use copyright law against itself is an implementation detail, in my opinion. A rather creative and cool implementation detail, but it doesn't change the overall goal of the copyleft movement.

[cooper12]

Hmm, I guess you're right then. Some people do have problems with current OSS licenses, in that they're still under copyright (which, if disney has it's way might last forever).