Re:Why your next project should be public domain
by arto on Thursday July 11, 2013 @09:26AM
(#6025859)
As detailed on D.J. Bernstein's page at http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html, a lot of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about public domain software can be traced back to Lawrence Rosen's influential 2002 Linux Journal article "Why the Public Domain Isn't a License".
(For those who may not know, Rosen is the former general counsel and secretary of OSI.)
However, that article was incorrect on a number of issues, as Bernstein points out. And indeed, Rosen has last year at long last recanted his previous views on public domain software:
> I have already voted +1 to approve the CC0 public domain dedication
> and fallback license as OSD compliant. I admit that I have argued for
> years against the "public domain" as an open source license, but in
> retrospect, considering the minimal risk to developers and users
> relying on such software and the evident popularity of that "license",
> I changed my mind. One can't stand in the way of a fire hose of free
> public domain software, even if it doesn't come with a better FOSS
> license that I trust more.
(For those who may not know, Rosen is the former general counsel and secretary of OSI.)
However, that article was incorrect on a number of issues, as Bernstein points out. And indeed, Rosen has last year at long last recanted his previous views on public domain software:
Source: http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012...The "fire hose" Rosen mentions can be witnessed in action at e.g. GitHub, with volumes of code now being put into the public domain on an everyday basis: https://github.com/search?q=%22public+domain%22&type=Code&s=...