Licensing policy change proposal

[Krešimir Čohar]

>It violates the Open Source definition, especially the rule against
discrimination against use or user. This has been a long-time yardstick for
the KDE community.
There isn't any discrimination? As long as the operators of the website are
being truthful, no one's rights have been violated without consent seeing
as they were waived voluntarily. Also, if I'm not mistaken, open source =/=
free and open source.

>There is. We cannot prove that we have explicit permission from the author
to use or distribute the work. We also have no way of tracking that who
submits the work to our channels has the right to do so. The idea of
“public domain” only really works for works where copyright has expired.

Several specious arguments here.
First, while it is hardly impossible to acquire proof that the authors'
rights have been waived, I would surmise that it is rarely done. In
addition, if the operators of the website are, again, being truthful, they
are the copyright holders and there is simply no need to ask anything of
the original authors.
Second, no way of tracking if the person submitting the work has the right
to do so? Isn't that covered in the license itself? Or are you just saying
that we simply don't know if they're lying?
Third, I wholeheartedly disagree. Not only does the public domain cover
intellectual properties the rights to which have been waived (in addition
to property whose copyright has expired), it also covers a variety of other
situations, see more here: https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/unprotected.html

A great example of this are movies, television series, books with the same
name because titles, names etc. don't receive copyright protection (and are
hence public domain).
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