Oh, yeah, I forgot about the “Urheberrecht”. Still, as both of us pointed out, this doesn’t make it illegal to put something under public domain.
It’s just not possible to give up the rights that are implied by authorship.
NobbZ
LostKobrakai
Depends on the definition of “public domain”. Afaik the definition implied by the american concept of public domain would be to give up authorship as well.
1
NobbZ
Then it’s not “illegal” but you simply can’t.
Noone will sue you because you tried, but dropping the authors right won’t have any effect and will invalidate the “license” as a whole.
But at no point in this process you’ll be sueable.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer
1
hauleth
PD is possible everywhere, but you need to die first (and then wait 50+ years) 
You cannot voluntarily reject your rights and place your work in PD though.
The same problem was in EEPs where “public domain” is not legal in some jurisdictions (it was confirmed by lawyers of Ericsson on @kennethL’s request).
No, it is not illegal to put something under public domain, it is impossible to do so (these are two different things). You may not be keen to sue anyone on “stealing” your work, but in case of author demise or putting someone under care (I do not know if there is English term for ubezwłasnowolnienie) then the designed handler of the rights is fully capable of suing anyone that uses that piece of work.
So in other words saying that “this work is in public domain” is void in many jurisdictions and mean nothing, so in the end that work is still proprietary (in law terms).
IANAL, but this is what I understand from my discussions with my lawyer friends (I am in weird position where half of my friends are programmers and other half is lawyers).
5
eksperimental
eksperimental
I have done my one hour of reading on this subject, and I pretty much came to the same conclusion.
CC Zero is the way to go. I am in doubt whether to go with dual license with MIT NO ATTRIBUTION or not, as there might be some companies that do not like PUBLIC DOMAIN such as Google that forbids the company to contribute to projects with such license, where it explicitly mentions CC ZERO and have an exception for BSD0. I am wondering if this practice is extended to other big companies.
In this case it has more to do to make sure that their contribution are their own work and not from other project with license, and if they are the copyrights should be attributed given the case.
I think there is nothing less restrictive than public domain, so if I want to relicense the project under MIT or GPL later I could.
But what if its the other way around, if the project is released under GPL and I want to relicense it under BSD or MIT, would that be even possible? Can contributors wave their right so in the future I choose the license I want, including a totally proprietary one? How does relicensing work?
0
lud
Can’t you just write your own WTFPL with your own wording? I someone came up with such a license, it looks like anyone can do the same, no?
0
eksperimental
Hi! I could just write “RELEASED UNDER PUBLIC DOMAIN” and it will have the same effect, But I am trying to avoid legal voids in certain countries, and projects not being able to use my project due to similar limitations due to lack of a license. The WTFPL and Unlicense licenses suffer from this.
2
dch
I’ve been through this a few times. You need to decide on the outcomes you want, and then pick the license to fit, not the other way around.
The https://choosealicense.com/ site makes finding something really easy.
See Licenses | Choose a License for a nice overview. SPDX License List | Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) has a very comprehensive but not very practical list of
accepted & common licences.
A well known / tested licence is always a better choice. BSD 2-Clause is such an example, or MIT which both have sensible liability & warranty claims, and don’t impose many conditions on usage.
From the MIT one:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
I think this is pretty clear about liability, and it’s very well understood. The less common a license you choose, the more likely it is that organisations are unlikely to choose it. You may feel that is a desirable outcome, it’s your choice after all.
If you have a trademark (a brand/name) that you intend to actively protect legally then Apache License 2.0 | Choose a License has a trademark claim. Trademarks in most regions require active protection (you send nasty letters from your lawyer to people who abuse yours, and if necessary follow up with a court filing), and if you don’t do that, you may lose the trademark.
Finally, choosing a GPL-ish licence for BEAM applications is tricky. What is a “larger work” in the context of an OTP Application? Or is it the whole Release? IANAL but I wouldn’t use a GPL-ish component in an Elixir app, just to avoid potential problems in the future, where my project now has an overall GPL licence because a component uses it.
As an aside, personally, after 25 years of open source work, I have come to 3 conclusions:
- use the licence that your programming language/tools are written in unless there’s some really good reason not to. This maximises your “give-back-ability” to the community, people can copy and cherry-pick freely.
- you can’t use a legal LICENSE to force companies and people to share or collaborate. It simply doesn’t work. You can sue them after the fact, like GPL enforcement, but its slow, inefficient, and doesn’t really work in the larger scheme. Focus on building and promoting collaboration culture within your community.
- if somebody forks my code, & makes it better, then we won anyway.
Getting really Off Topic, the battle between AWS and Elastic (or Redis which had a similar argument) is really about Venture Capitalists vs Amazon Capitalists, and to an extent, branding, as already pointed out. As Elastic Co is valued at over $10B I don’t think the founder can really complain that they haven’t had a good return on the invested hours. It has ~ $870M cash balance sheet, $700M revenues, growing at 40% each quarter, and made $500M gross profit with debt of $600M. I think we can safely say they did Just Fine with their original Apache v2 Licence strategy. If AWS keeps improving ElasticSearch, then Elastic can continue to pull their patches and ideas into Elastic, and the software improves. It might not be desirable for their company, but that’s a very different perspective.
2