Hi Erach,

Erach wrote:

Hi, Since the FOSS movement in India is gathering strength WE NEED TO PROPOSE OUR COPYRIGHT / LICENSE to the companies so we can understand them without any lawyer required.

What is it that you are copyrighting ? Is it software, documentation, both ?

How is this copyright ? (C) Erach A. Irani, 2008. Can be freely used in part or in whole for any purpose whatsoever.

Or (C) Erach A. Irani, 2008 Can be freely used, with or without payment of any kind, in part or in whole, for any purpose whatsoever.

I am assuming here that you meant software, and the copyright applies to the source-code and binaries.

If this is true, IANAL, but either of these sound like "no copyright" or public domain (ie: you are giving away all rights).

Remember that the whole point of a copyright is to lay down the rules for use, copying and distribution. For example, with your copyright statements, the person receiving your product (software/documentation/whatever) would have complete legal freedom to remove your copyright statement, relicense and redistribute your product (possibly in a more restrictive and proprietary) manner ...after you do say "freely used ... for any purpose"

If you are ok with this, you don't even have to include a copyright statement. That would automatically imply your product is public domain.

If you do want to allow the users complete freedom, but also impose the restriction that if they modify or redistribute modifications they would have to do so under the same or similar terms that they obtained the software, *then* you use a FOSS license.

Some of the shorter (and least restrictive) licenses that you may use are the variants of what is called the MIT license.

I would recommend that you should learn a bit about copyrights even if you do not intend to enforce any control/copyright.

regards, - steve