

Ask YC:  If someone releases something as public domain, how can you trust him/her? - amichail

I'm especially suspicious of something like a public domain scrabble word list.  This takes enormous effort to put together.  If you are told that it's public domain, then how do you know that this is true and that it would be safe to use it in your code for commercial purposes?<p>I'm interested in using this word list from http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/software.html:<p>"Updated millennial edition of ENABLE (ENABLE2K): The Enhanced North American Benchmark LEexicon package provides a 173,000+ word standardized tournament-level master list, more carefully researched than "official" and proprietary lists. It is not restricted to words of an arbitrary length and it features all "official" updates. The ENABLE list has been placed in the Public Domain and is both free and freely distributable. This is the list used by the WORDY word study system, above, and by various online Scrabble® servers and software developers (at least two commercial word games use it as its dictionary). It is highly recommended that the (updated) ENABLE SUPPLEMENT [785K], and the ABLE SUPPLEMENT [559K], additional lists and documentation packages for ENABLE be obtained. Freeware."
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a-priori
What sort of trust do you mean?

Do you mean trust in the quality of the product? You need to decide that for
yourself, just like always.

Do you mean trust that the author won't be a jerk in the future and try to
stop you from using it? They can't: they've released it into the public
domain. They can decide later to release a new version under a new license or
stop distributing it, but they can't stop you from using that version once
you've obtained it.

~~~
amichail
I mean maybe the author(s) copied part of the work from something that is not
public domain and then claimed wrongly that the result is public domain.

In my case, having to change the word list later because it turns out that
part of it was copied from a proprietary source would mess up my puzzle.

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inklesspen
If someone releases something under the BSD license, how do can you trust
him/her? I'm especially suspicious of something like an operating system with
its attendant functionality, such as the TCP/IP stack. This takes enormous
effort to put together. If you are told that it's under the BSD license, then
how do you know that this is true and that it would be safe to use it in your
code for commercial purposes?

~~~
amichail
You haven't answered my question.

~~~
randallsquared
I think he has, but to paraphrase:

The amount of work put into making the initial copy of something has no
bearing on the license. Some people don't care about the amount of work
something took, after the fact. The current rights-holder may not have
actually done the work. The current rights-holder may have political beliefs
that conflict with copyright.

Anyway, if you're asking whether you should trust a third party about the
license for something, the answer is no. However, you seem to be asking
whether you should trust the rights-holder about the license they themselves
used, which just seems odd.

~~~
amichail
I mean maybe the author(s) copied part of the work from something that is not
public domain and then claimed wrongly that the result is public domain.

In my case, having to change the word list later because it turns out that
part of it was copied from a proprietary source would mess up my puzzle.

~~~
inklesspen
What if you use BSD-licensed code, only it later turns out that the person who
added the license wasn't the copyright holder? What if you ask someone if you
can have something, and he says yes, but later it turns out it wasn't his to
give away?

The license is irrelevant; you are worried about people claiming something is
under X terms, when it's not. The answer to this is: do your legal due
diligence like everyone else.

(The only wrinkle is that in some jurisdictions it's not legally possible to
put something into the public domain. This does not seem to bother most
people.)

