Heh. I didn’t copyright it. Microsoft did. That’s machine-generated code. But, even if I take it out, I still have a copyright in it. You have a copyright in anything you create once it is “fixed in a tangible medium.”
I researched this while I was in law school. It’s a widely recognized, somewhat puzzling omission in the international conventions that govern copyrights. It used to be the case that you had to put a copyright notice on things. If you didn’t, they were public domain. When the Berne Convention adopted the “fixed in a tangible medium” standard, copyrights attached automatically. But no one bothered to consider the case where a person might be willing to abandon those rights. If you did put an “I abandon my copyrights” statement at the top of your code, I expect most judges would ask you to abide by it. But I wouldn’t bet my license on that.
Note that open-source licenses themselves tend to assert copyrights. Without that, you can’t enforce the terms of the license.
I actually would be willing to put my faith in that, but the question Kenny asked was about publishing them to public repos. That’s very slightly different, since it makes them readily available to anyone for download on their own. In a distributable product, they’d be somewhat obscured. (Any tech-savvy user could find them, but not everyone.) Regardless, the requirement would probably be there that we have to prohibit redistribution of Trimble’s file(s). Developers can distribute them (assuming that informal statement you’ve quoted is binding, which I think it is), but people not licensed by Trimble to be developers can’t.
However, like I said above, I think the right thing to do will be to ask Trimble for a review and get their blessing. I’m hoping Thom can point me towards the right people when we reach that point.
Still working on the higher-level stuff. Will have that ready to show you in a couple of days.
Thanks again!