[Openfontlibrary] Re: [DejaVu-fonts] forming new maintenance team for MPH 2B Damase?

[Karl Berry]

[Trimming cc since I doubt all those other lists care.]

    > I'm also just a bit curious as to why someone thinks I should claim
    > copyright of the font and release it under a free license.

Debian(*), among others, have pointed out that the concept of dedicating
something to the public domain is not worldwide.  Expiration of
copyright (and thus something becoming public domain) is universal among
Berne Convention countries, but that's a different thing than
individuals dedicating a work to the public domain "before its time".
The legal status of such works is arguable, and has been argued
(endlessly; I hope we won't rehash it here).

Therefore, they recommend (which is not to say require) copyrighting
material with a minimal all-permissive license statement, similar to
what Ed wrote.  Here is the recommended sentence which I was told:
  You may freely use, modify and/or distribute this file.

It's a drag, because copyrighting something (vs. public domain) means
having to update the list of years whenever the material is modified.
But that seems to be the world we are living in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain has a lot more about this.

Of course, there are plenty of other licenses with similar effect, like
Expat (http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt).

Karl

(*) Actually, I don't know where this concern came from originally.  I
personally first heard it from Debian developers telling me about some
minor TeX-related files.