Man, this indeed a <i>very old discussion</i>. Better late than never I guess if you had something you wanted to say, but none of this is very fresh in my mind so I'll try to eloquently reiterate a whole ranty amount of thought that I had on the subject.<br>
<br>Basically, all that I'm saying is that declaring a license is a very loose concept legally (regardless of the license itself) as apposed to actually federally registering/trademarking/copyrighting something etc, it's basically your word and nothing else.<br>
<br>Essentially it's a good faith approach, like a hand shake. Obviously GPL has legal precedence:<br><br><a href="http://technosailor.com/2010/07/14/impending-legal-precedent-for-gpl-licensing/">http://technosailor.com/2010/07/14/impending-legal-precedent-for-gpl-licensing/</a><br>
<br>Should you be able to adequately prove that something you created is your creation and that you've defined it as "licensed" under the GPL.<br><br>This isn't a discussion about whether to license and how to license your works, of course you should do any and all things you can to protect your work and the freedoms of your users based on how you want them to be able to freely use the software and so on.<br>
<br>It's kind of like trademark law, you don't <i>have</i> <i>to</i> actually register something at the federal level, technically, if you coin a phrase or company/product/service name, register the domain, sell a product and establish yourself you're essentially protected under trademark law, but no where near the level you are if you legally at the federal document level register, "Here I am!"<br>
<br>So we're not really discussing to GPL or not to GPL, it's to Declare vs Notarize. The idea being that declaring is really just your word, but to notarize is to have external 3rd party proof on file that's dated and sealed to back your word up. So you could print out the GPL (adding info at the top about the software, your info, date etc) and go and have it notarized. That's probably the best option right now. But I'm not really finding any official, widely respected government body that allows you to properly register software under GPL. Perhaps that's something for us to consider forming or maybe there already is something like that?<br>
<br>It's probably called having your own attorney, after all, possession is 9/10 of the law. But, that's really not a viable solution for everyone and is indeed a bit counterproductive to the overall spirit of <i>free</i> software.<br>
<br>End of rant 2.0.<br clear="all"><br><br>Bryan Phillip Hadaway<br>
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