🚀 go-pugleaf

You can do whatever you want with public domain software, legally.
You can sell it, modify it, give it away, or whatever.  That's
what public domain means - no one owns any rights to it.

Some companies sell disks containing public domain software.  What they
are charging for is the service of gathering this software and selecting
the worthwhile from the worthless, and possibly testing the software at
least a little bit to make sure that it works and does not contain
a virus.

Some people think that it is not ethical to charge anything for
disks containing public domain software, but I can't agree with this.

For example, I have here a CD-ROM from BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh Users
Group) that contains a couple hundred meg of PD and shareware stuff.
This cost me something like $80 dollars.  I could have obtained all this
stuff without paying a cent to BMUG, but that would have involved many
hours scrounging around on Compuserve, GEnie, Portal, Usenet, and various
BBSs, and probably have cost me more than $80 in connect time and certainly
a lot more than $80 in time.

The result was that BMUG gave me a way to spend $80 on their disc to
save much more than $80.  I come out ahead, and they make enough money
(I hope) to pay for their costs and make enough profit to further their
activities.  This seems quite reasonable to me.  And anyone who thinks
that they are charging to much is free to go to the same sources BMUG
went to and gather the same data and try to undercut them.

As far as modifying public domain works to include in works of your
own, I don't see any ethical problem.  When an author puts a work in
the public domain, that author is saying, "I give up *ALL* rights to have
any say in what this is used for."  The only time there might be an ethical
question would be if the author did not mean for the work to become public
domain.  Under earlier versions of copyright law, it was fairly easy for
one to make mistakes that would cause one to lose copyright protection.
This has been made much harder in the current versions of copyright law.
Anyway, because of this there may be works that are in the public domain
by accident.  I would myself avoid using these without the authors permission
because I find it wrong to exploit someone like that, but there would be
no legal problem.

Finally, there is something called a compilation copyright.  If someone
spends the time to gather up selected public domain sofware and organize
it into collections and adds value to these collections (say, by testing
the software or something), I think that they can copyright the collection
as a whole.  You won't be able to buy the whole collection from them and
duplicate it.  The books I've read on copyright don't say much about
compilation copyright (they are aimed at the producer of software, not
the compiler of software), so I don't know anything about this.  Maybe
someone on misc.legal will jump in with the real story?

If you are a programmer, think carefully before placing something in the
public domain.  Once it's there, you have lost all control over it.  For
example, I wrote a Macintosh DA that lets you pretent that you are Maxwell's
Demon.  There is a box with a wall in the middle with a door, and little balls
are bouncing around.  You try to get the fast ones on one side and the slow ones
on the other.  The fast ones are little black circles, and the slow ones
are little white circles with smiley faces in them.

I think I placed this in the public domain (I actually don't remember - I
haven't looked at it for years).  If I did, you could take this and do
repugnent things to it and I couldn't do a damn thing.  For example, you
could rename it from "Maxwell" to "Racial Purity", put little swastikas
in the white balls instead of the smiley faces, label one side of the box
"Africa", and change the instructions to read "Try to put the niggers back
in Africa where they belong".  And you could leave my name on it.  I would
be outraged.  I would want to extract your testicles via your anus.  I would
want to shove a live bobcat down your throat and then do something to piss
it off.  In short, I would strongly disapprove.  And there would be nothing
I could do.

Don't put your software in the public domain unless you mean it.

						Tim Smith