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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't open source license like MIT or ASL2 imply that there is an entity holding copyright? The very first line of MIT license is

    Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

But if USG can not hold copyright, how can it then apply license to its works?

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I don't see much problem with somebody saying "we don't recognize our property over X, but if you for some reason insist we have property over it, we allow usage under those conditions."

It's a really Kafkanian situation. And changing the license to make both claims not contradict each other would be way worse. But given the circumstances, it's a reasonable thing to write.

The USG cannot hold copyright in the US in certain cases, but it can still apply copyright outside the US. So one approach is to say "no copyright within the US, outside the US use this license".

The USG can hold copyright in some cases (e.g., copyright can be transferred to the USG). As often happens, "it's complicated".

There’s potential to invalidate the license because that first line is left blank or is inaccurate as sometimes people mistakenly add a copyright notice.

But our attorneys said that wasn’t a problem and we haven’t had any problems in the past decade, knock on wood.

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