I've been taking a look at OpenID and searching for PHP implementations. Along the way I've come across several programs that are typically only 5-10k long. And I'm seeing a wide variety of copyright statements at the top which basically say "do what you like but leave my name on this because I want attribution". Sometimes there's even a no commercial restriction. I have to ask myself, what are you trying to achieve and what are you afraid of? This all gets particularly annoying in an area where the code is very likely to get absorbed into a bigger system, as is the case with Identity.

So here's a request. If you're contributing code to the world, either use an established copyright scheme like GPL, or effectively make it public domain. Which is why when I do this stuff I typically put a disclaimer in the top of the file that says "do whatever you like with this, I don't care". It would be nice to hav a more formal way of saying this but I've never found a formal way of saying "I renounce copyright over this file".


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[ 19-Jul-05 8:30am ] [ ]