Advice on Public Domain license

The SQLite docs mention some possible headaches around the concept of “public domain” under the Warranty of Title section.

Flipping the question on its head, what’s an example of a situation where an MIT license would give a result you don’t want? That might help folks figure out what license would fit better.

Maybe it’s worth looking at the current license of Elastic. They’ve been hit hard by Amazon some months ago and I am sure they wisened up a lot on what licenses to use for open source that specifically disallows a corporation to use your software and then bully you as if they are the authors.

Do you have a link to read about this, to put it in context?

I have been reading about it, after I posted the question.
There are some countries, like Germany where it is illegal to release stuff to the public domain, therefor a license is needed.
I have read some criticism against “Unlincense” because of this, where CC Zero has a sort of backup policy where in countries where PUBLIC DOMAIN is not accepted,then the CC ZERO license act as one (in layman terms, I AM NOT A LAWYER).

There is a pretty recent MIT license known as MIT NO ATTRIBUTION which acts pretty much as a public-domain license,
IT IS LIKE MIT but you do not need to give attribution.
Another similar is the ZERO BSD, which is no directly related (only in name) to the BSD-2 license, but no attribution is needed.

what’s an example of a situation where an MIT license would give a result you don’t want?

1. Don’t want to impose anything, not even the attribution notice and the copy of the license.
2. Don’t want to have the COPYRIGHT notice (all rights reversed, sort of thing). I want my work to be part of the public domain. Whether the user/creator of derivative work wants to give credit, it is up to her.

It was an awful clusterf_ck back then and most details elude me now. This is a good entry point: Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing | Elastic Blog

Also maybe this: https://getpremiumblog.com/2021/12/27/elastic-ceo-reflects-on-amazon-spat-license-switch-and-the-principles-of-open-source/

What I understand it was a issue of Amazon using the name of their product to promote their services “Amazon ElasticSearch Services”. It beats me how they managed to get away with it when their product was under Apache 2.0 (which prevents derivative works to user the name of the original product or any derivative name) and they product name was trademarked in 2011.

Regarding my use case, I would say this does not affect as I will have no ownership of any name, and that is the idea. If someone ever decide to trademark the name of your library I guess the license will have no saying in whether you have more rights over the trademark in question.

It is interesting because Amazon could start providing “Amazon Elixir Services”, since Elixir is using the same Apache 2.0 license.

Thank for bringing it up, anyway it is good to know and it was a good read,

Regarding of code contribution, I will be requiring contributors to use

Currently, from what I can remember based on my previous contributions, OTP and Livebook use it.

Assuming you really want to publish under public domain, then CC0 would be the way to go. It purposefully tries to relinquish copyright if allowed (part 2), or offer a license that’s as free as possible (part 3) as an alternative. Unlicense is the same but less wordy. WTFPL is the same but humorous.

Just writing “Published under public domain” won’t be enough, as has been noted by SQLite, since it’s just not possible to do that in some countries.

IANAL, but I don’t think a CLA is needed if you’re not intending to relicense the code later under a different license (or want to keep the door open for doing that).

I never heard of this.

PD is possible in Germany, though not the default. In Germany when no explicit license is mentioned with the source code, it is assumed to be all rights with the author and not even downloading from GitHub would be allowed from what I understand.

Putting software under “public domain” is possible though, but of course the understanding what these 2 words mean differs between legislatives, therefore you’d also always put an explicit license that explains in a legal proof way what these 2 words mean specifically.

So you are basically back to “choose the license”.

In Germany it’s not possible to transfer or give up the “Urheberrecht” (author’s rights) so it’s not illegal, but rather impossible to release things to the public domain. The initial author will always retain their “Urheberrecht”.

Though this is separate from “Nutzungsrecht” (rights of use) and many other rights, which can still allow others to use the released work. How exactly needs to be defined however and therefore licenses are required.