No, any copyleft license is a better open source license. In fact, proprietary licenses are better as well; with MIT or BSD licenses you are writing code that a corporation will make proprietary, effectively writing proprietary code for them, except you don't get paid for it. It would be better to use a proprietary license and get paid than to use the BSD/MIT license, have your code turned into that same proprietary product, and not even get paid for it.

Even giving your code to the public domain is better than an MIT or BSD license; corporations will still be able to make it proprietary but at least it clears the air around the 'interesting question' of mixing MIT/BSD code into a copyleft project and distributing the whole lot under a copyleft license.

That's pretty naive. If we are talking about individual developers, big companies like Microsoft can blatantly use your GPL code in their proprietary code and you will have no money to fight them in court anyways. If it's big company deliberately choosing MIT/BSD for their open source project, they don't need your lecture. They have their own lawyers to tell them what license benefit the most.

> Even giving your code to the public domain is better than an MIT or BSD license

Maybe in the US, but much of the world doesn't recognise waving away all author rights voluntarily. The closest thing to worldwide public domain is probably the Creative Commons Zero licence.

Pretty much only corporations get themselves in a twist over that technicality, so what's the problem? Community FOSS projects don't worry about buying a license to SQLite, but the corporations with their lawyers do. This makes public domain even better.

I'm serious, how many German individuals do you think would refuse to install sqlite on their personal computer because they lack a technically valid license for it? A few such weirdos doubtlessly exist but you can safely ignore them.

Either you care about licenses, in which case you care about that technicality, or you don't care about licenses, in which case Microsoft using the correct license for their own code and adhering to that license is not something you care about either.

The risk is not "I don't have a license because public domain doesn't exist", the risk is "the rights I have are revokable on a whim because they haven't properly waived their right to do so".

SQLite has a good track record but I can imagine another strongly religious developer taking advantage of authorship rights to damage some small EU-based social organization they strongly disagreed with; just an example.

As for the weirdos, as I said SQLite has a good track record, but I'd think twice over a much smaller dependency. However, I've seen enough disregard for FOSS licenses in business to know the weirdos are few. I guess you either care about license minutae or you don't.