User talk:JohnHGaff

Welcome!
Hello, JohnHGaff, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:24, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Open source vs public domain
Hi! I wanted to drop a quick note. I saw that you named the patent as open source, however if the copyright expired this would make it public domain rather than open source. This may seem like the same thing at first glance, however the difference here is that open source content is released under copyright. This copyright usually allows people to adapt and copy the work for their own purposes. Where this differs from the public domain is that depending on the license used, the copyright holder can prevent people from doing things like releasing the work for their own purposes or applying a more restrictive copyright to the material. Basically, the copyright holder of the original work can dictate what happens with the work and what licenses any derivative materials will be released under. For example, I expand a journal article released under a Creative Commons license that allows people to adapt the materials as long as they release the material under the same license, which doesn't allow any sort of commercial use. This means that I can't copyright protect my work to prevent others from adapting it or sell it myself commercially.

With public domain materials you can freely adapt the work without having to ask permission. You can't claim copyright on the original public domain material, but you can claim copyright on the new material you created and added. A good example here would be the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The base work, Pride and Prejudice, is in the public domain so the author was able to adapt it to a zombie tale. Since public domain allows people to copyright the new material added, he was able to copyright the final product to prevent others from adapting any of the new added content in a way that he or the publisher wouldn't approve of.

So the basics of this is that while the two terms have a lot of similarity, they do differ when it comes down to copyright. As such, I'd change this from being open source to specifying that it's in the public domain since there is a difference between the two. This goes into it a bit more. It discusses it in relation to software, but the general idea is the same. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:44, 12 June 2019 (UTC)