copyrighted.

For some, this is because while it's reasonable to assume that US courts

will recognize abandonment of copyright given a clear enough notice from the

author, that's not necessarily true in all jurisdictions and even if it was,

we don't know what form exactly a dedication should take to convince courts

and prevent confusion or attempted revocations.

For others, it's because authors feel that enforcing through copyright one or

more license condtions, reasonably chosen to correspond to their wishes, is

another way to create Free Software that everyone benefits from.

In the case of FSF and the GNU Project, copyrighting and licensing software

was done due to very careful planning.

% FIXME: can't this be written better?

% The core intention of copyleft is to keep software from being reused in

% proprietary software. [It's the last - not discussed in the guide? - paragraph

% in GPLv2 and v3; though not part of the legal text, I'd argue it pervades it.]

% This means a lot of things, but it doesn't automatically mean that the public

% domain would disappear otherwise, in the simple sense that what is in the public

% domain remains there. If the argument is that there aren't adequate incentives

% for enlarging it, that's different than saying someone can shrink it.

% If there are serious reasons for thinking one can shrink it, then those

% reasons seem worth discussing separately from the incentives issue.