Sat 2003-01-18 20:52, William McBrine (1:106/2000) wrote to andrew clarke:

 ac>> It contains a lot of code not written by me that was released to the
 ac>> public domain.  The licencing could not change without permission 
 ac>> from all of those people.

 > Being in the public domain means the code _has_ no license, is not
 > copyrighted, and can be re-released under the GPL or any other license
 > without permission. Strange but true.

No, artistic works can't be copyrighted once they enter the public domain.

Also, lately I've been lead to believe that effectively the only way
artistic works can lawfully enter the "public domain" is by the
author dying and the copyright expiring after N years, ie. attaching
"Written by Andrew Clarke and released to the public domain" to a
document has no legal meaning, and I still have legal control over the
copyright until I die, then there is a grace period (for the family of the
author).

Unfortunately I don't have any lawyer friends that specialise in
intellectual property.  The only way to prove/disprove this may be for it
to go to court.  And then the outcome may be different depending which
country you live in.

 > But anyway, if some of the code really is public domain, then you don't
 > _have_ to relicense that part for the package to qualify as Free, since
 > "public domain" also counts as a Free license. On the other
hand, it's 
 > probably simpler to distribute the whole thing under one license.

Then any program that statically links the GPLed MSGAPI would need to be
GPL'd also, AFAIK.  So you would need to build a DLL or shared library
version of the GPLed MSGAPI, which is fine for Windows, OS/2, UNIX, but not
DOS (although it may be possible with 32-bit DOS using DOS4G).

Of course, there may be an exception in the GPLed MSGAPI that allows static
linking, but I haven't checked for that.  I'm more concerned about just
getting the code working and stable at the moment.

-- mail{at}ozzmosis.com

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