Customized DOC License

[ianjkalin]

Regarding the following section:

"Software code created by U.S. Government employees is not subject to copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. §105). The United States/Department of Commerce reserve all rights to seek and obtain copyright protection in countries other than the United States for Software authored in its entirety by the Department of Commerce. To this end, the Department of Commerce hereby grants to Recipient a royalty-free, nonexclusive license to use, copy, and create derivative works of the Software outside of the United States.
The United States Department of Commerce (DOC) GitHub project code is provided on an ‘as is’ basis and the user assumes responsibility for its use. DOC has relinquished control of the information and no longer has responsibility to protect the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of the information. Any claims against the Department of Commerce stemming from the use of its GitHub project will be governed by all applicable Federal law. Any reference to specific commercial products, processes, or services by service mark, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply their endorsement, recommendation or favoring by the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce seal and logo, or the seal and logo of a DOC bureau, shall not be used in any manner to imply endorsement of any commercial product or activity by DOC or the United States Government."

The following 4 related issues have been raised by the open source community:

1. This license is specific to DOC and does not leverage industry standards (e.g. MIT, GPL, etc.) Such a specific standalone creates a barrier to open source interaction.
2. It’s unclear what rights, if any, the government gets if a user contributes to a DoC open source project. Normally, there is an implied reciprocal license, which stems from the project’s license, but here, when it’s government specific, and noting that the project is not subject to domestic copyright (where my contributions would be), things get murky.
3. Why does the DoC seek to maintain international copyright? You’re also only granting a subset of IP rights (e.g., I don’t have the right to distribute). So what happens if a British citizen stands up commerce-code.gov.uk and simply mirrors your code? Since open source isn’t bound by geographic lines, most government agencies simply release their code under CC0 such that all potential users are on equal footing.

[ianjkalin]

Corrected typo with number of issues logged in original post.

[ChrisBarker-NOAA]

Thanks for bringing this up -- as they say, IANAL, but I"m really confused how it's even possible to have something in the public domain in one country (the US) and copyrighted elsewhere. Once it's in the Public domain, anyone can use it for anything, yes? but then they move it to antoher country and suddenly you're violating copyright?

Anyway, this text implies that the work may be copyrighted in some other jurisdiction some day -- which leaves any potential user taking on a an unknown risk -- so why can't we relinquish that right, and simply put it in the Public Domain (i.e CC0)?

Alternatively, I suppose you could declare that any code that does claim a copyright in any other jurisdiction will be released under a named Open Source License.

I'll also note that the LICENCE file of this repo itself is the CC0 -- not this weird "we may copyright it somewhere" statement.