I don't think this is a good idea for two reasons. 1) you don't have the right to put anything but your own work into the public domain (and even then because of implicit copyrights, etc. even a dedication to the public domain may not be sufficient). 2) by putting the work into the public domain you lose all control over it - someone else can sell it, and take credit for it for instance, and the author (or anyone else for that matter) will have no recourse.

For some information on how to put something in the public domain, see:

http://www.fin.ucar.edu/legal/faq_publicdomain.html

I don't want to discourage you from putting your work into the public domain (assuming it is possible), but rather note that your statement that something is in the public domain carries no weight if it is not owned by you in the first place. Copyright, is in fact implicit when a work is fixed (i.e. written to disk), so it is held by the author (or in the case of a work for hire, by the client) regardless of having an explicit notice.

If you want to put something into the public domain, you will at the very least have to have the author submit a statement of dedication to that effect.

Brad Miller

-----Original Message----- From: slime-devel-bounces@common-lisp.net [mailto:slime-devel-bounces@common-lisp.net] On Behalf Of mb@bese.it Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 5:54 PM To: slime-devel@common-lisp.net Subject: [slime-devel] COPYRIGHT change - slime contributors please read this

hi,

I have changed the license statement in SLIME's README. it used to be:

------------------------------------------------------------------------ SLIME is free software. The source files are licensed separately for maximum compatibility with their host environment, for example slime.el is GPL and swank-cmucl.lisp is public domain. See the source files for more details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is now this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------ SLIME is free software. All files, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are public domain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

So if you've contributed code to SLIME and haven't supplied a copyright statement your code is now public domain. If you have an issue with this please bring it up asap.

For what it's worth the only files which were missing a copyright statement were swank-ecl.lisp, doc/Makefile, HACKING, NEWS, PROBLEMS and README. juan jose garcia (the original author of swank-ecl.lisp) is ok with the change so I don't think anyone should be surprised be this change.