Corporate policy
Corporate policy
Posted Aug 27, 2010 23:58 UTC (Fri) by dfsmith (guest, #20302)In reply to: History of free licensing. by jg
Parent article: Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible
As an IBM employee* who has just gone through the "Certificate of Originality" procedure we have for software here, I can attest to some of the reasoning why the copyright statement is necessary. It basically boils down to "if it doesn't say who wrote it and owns it, it may be in violation of someone else's license". I.e., even if code says "public domain", we can't ship it because we can't know if it was copied from another source.
* I am not writing officially for IBM here (we have a communications department for that), nor am I in legal but this may be enlightening anyway.