On Apr 7, 2014, at 8:18 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: Indeed. It may be worth that much, or it may not, but certainly that is not in any way shape or form ?open software?. paul

While it looks odd, there is a certain logic to it. The problem is that "contractors" will take government software that is unencumbered by a copyright statement and then resell it back to the government as part of their contracted "software development" (putting their own copyright statement on it, of course). The "Copyright US Government" statement is intended to make such unsavory practices ... clearly illegal. The US government (mostly, if not perhaps entirely, I guess) hasn't caught up to "copyleft" and other forms of more flexible licensing statements that could be used to avoid the underlying problem. And, of course, one imagines software that was created before the whole idea of Open Source and flexible/varying copyleft/right clauses/statements became widely available ... and one further imagines that reviewing and clearing each such item for a new copy-foo statement might become a burden. So, caveat emptor? On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 8:30 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:

On Mon, 07 Apr 2014 17:18:30 -0700 Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: The whole "openchannel" site is a rip... I've downloaded a quite a bit of source code from NASA w/o charge. The "User Agreements" or "Keys" can be a pain - but they don't cost anything... Lyle -- Bickley Consulting West Inc. http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"