I was thinking about this last night. Should I use a license agreement that gives my proprietary software to the public domain when I die? What about my open source software that I can no longer maintain? In my case, the software is probably not popular enough to continue without me. Should it keep a GPL license or be converted to MIT or to public domain?
What if I do have a hit someday and it provides income to me? My family might rely on that income, at least for a time, if I die early. I’d love to give a business to my kids and them to their kids.
Anyway, just rambling. I agree that copyright is probably too long.
I was always sort of surprised nobody invented a clear declaration for that sort of thing-- a pre-packaged, battle-tested paragraph you could put in your will that says "On my death, all my copyrights immediately revert to the public domain."
Market it in a cute way, like "content donor" analogous to the "organ donor" tickoff on the driver's license form.
I have an unwritten dying wish to grant all my writing to the public domain when I pass away, but still need to figure out where to cram that in the will and need to set it up with someone to update the licenses and copyright notices for me.
I was thinking about this last night. Should I use a license agreement that gives my proprietary software to the public domain when I die? What about my open source software that I can no longer maintain? In my case, the software is probably not popular enough to continue without me. Should it keep a GPL license or be converted to MIT or to public domain?
What if I do have a hit someday and it provides income to me? My family might rely on that income, at least for a time, if I die early. I’d love to give a business to my kids and them to their kids.
Anyway, just rambling. I agree that copyright is probably too long.