Friday, April 3, 2009

FDS-SMV Project 'Public Domain' License.

Google Code Project Hosting, which we use for our development process, updated their licensing options to include 'Public Domain' as a valid type. This is applicable for US Federal Government Agencies like NIST who by US Copyright law, are required to release their works as Public Domain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

Chapter 1 of Title 17 of the United States Code states:

§ 105. Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works37
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

When we first setup the fds-smv project we had to select a license option to get the project in the system. At the time the MIT license was the most liberal from those we had to select from. But, still even though we picked MIT for Google Code Hosting requirements, we were careful to clearly state where relevant that everything we are creating and releasing is Public Domain according to US Copyright Law. It took some time in limbo, after some online and offline discussions with the Google Code Hosting Developers, but eventually it all worked out. This additional license option is great news for US Government Open Source Software (OSS) developers, as now we can select the correct option and use these tools without any confusion as to the type of license applied to the work product.

-Bryan