[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> Quoting Alan DuBoff (aland at softorchestra.com):
> > The NSA licenses their code in the public domain, with no copyrights
> > on it. I like that style myself.
> 
> No, they do _not_.  They have no choice in the matter, as such
> (Federally-created) works never had any copyright title in the first
> place.  No property interest, ergo no possibility of licensing of any
> kind.  Per 17 U.S.C. 105:
> 
>    Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work
>    of the United States Government, but the United States Government is
>    not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it
>    by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

I've heard people say that before, and many agencies do take that
approach with the photographs that they publish on their web sites.
But that's only a small fraction of the content created by public
agencies. There's a lot of useful software created at agencies like
NASA whose source is never made public. And a lot of the data from
government-funded studies isn't made available in its raw form.
Like raw images from NASA missions: some missions, like
Cassini, are great about making their raw data available,
but other missions have a very different philosophy.

I've tried asking about source code a couple times, with no
success. And when I ask friends who work for the government
"Isn't software from publically funded projects supposed to be
public domain?" I get only incredulous looks.  The incredulity
may be tied to the fact that a large amount of government work is
classified, and so obviously is not made public (and in many cases
will never be).

Do you know what makes something a "work of the United States
Government" as specified in 17 U.S.C. 105?  Does it matter whether
it was done entirely by US Government employees, vs. something done
by another organization (say, JPL or UC) under contract from the
government?  Does the funding have to come exclusively from the US
government? Anybody have much luck citing 17 U.S.C. 105 to get
access to source code, photos or data?

	...Akkana