Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it into a Linux source-code file) ?

Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?

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robinsonb5 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?

You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain code if you wish.

The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license against people who obtain the code independently - either from the same source you did, or from a different source that doesn't carry your license.

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cwnyth 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This is correct, and it's not limited to code. I can take the story of Cinderella, create something new out of it, copyright my new work, but Cinderella remains public domain for someone else to do something with.

If I use public domain code in a project under a license, the whole work remains under the license, but not the public domain code.

I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is about.

	▲	manwe150 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If someone else uses your exact same prompt to generate the exact same code, can you claim copyright infringement against them? If the output is possible to copyright, then you could claim their prompt is infringement (just like if it reproduced Harry Potter). If it isn’t copyrightable, then the kernel would not have legal standing to enforce the GPL on those lines of code against any future AI reproduction of them. The developers might need to show that the code is licensed under GPL and only GPL, otherwise there is the possibility the same original contributor (eg the AI) did permit the copy. The GPL is an imposed restriction on what the kernel can legally do with any code contributions. That seems legally complicated for some projects—probably not the kernel with the large amount of pre-AI code, but maybe it spells trouble for smaller newer projects if they want to sue over infringement. IANAL.

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miki123211 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Linux code doesn't have to strictly be GPL-only, it just has to be GPL-compatible.

If your license allows others to take the code and redistribute it with extra conditions, your code can be imported into the kernel. AFAIK there are parts of the kernel that are BSD-licensed.

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jaggederest 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The core thing about licenses, in general, is that they only grant new usage. If you can already use the code because it's public domain, they don't further restrict it. The license, in that case, is irrelevant.

Remember that licenses are powered by copyright - granting a license to non-copyrighted code doesn't do anything, because there's no enforcement mechanism.

This is also why copyright reform for software engineering is so important, because code entering the public domain cuts the gordian knot of licensing issues.

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sambaumann 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sqlite’s source code is public domain. Surely if you dropped the sqlite source code into Linux, it wouldn’t suddenly become GPL code? I’m not sure how it works