Over at the Meshed Insights blog, Simon Phipps writes about why the public domain falls short and more detailed licensing is needed in order to extend rights to a software community.
Yes, public domain may give you the rights you need. But in an open source project, it's not enough for you to determine you personally have the rights you need. In order to function, every user and contributor of the project needs prior confidence they can use, improve and share the code, regardless of their location or the use to which they put it. That confidence also has to extend to their colleagues, customers and community as well.
Source : The Universal Donor
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:24PM (1 child)
Seems a bit odd that TFA makes no mention whatsoever of what you should use instead of public domain. Anyway, it is well known [opensource.org] that [opensource.org] public domain is an awful way to release software as 'copycentre', and that the Modified BSD Licence is the way to go.
There are other contenders, like the Unlicence and the WTFPL and CC0, but they're [stackexchange.com] not wise [stackexchange.com] choices either. Just go with Modified BSD. The FreeBSD guys already thought this over.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:28PM
Forgive the self-reply, but a related fun fact: the FSF recommend [gnu.org] the Apache Licence for copycenter licensing.