2022-11-10
Recently I've been reading a lot about what options there are for putting software (and other works) into the public domain. Basically it comes down to CC0, 0BSD, Unlicense, MIT0 (and WTFPL I guess). Ok, so why am I writing this post? Because there is so much nonsense related to this topic. I'm not a lawyer though.
"But why do you care about public domain? Just license it under regular permissive license like MIT, Apache, etc. or use copyleft like GPL for the greater good!" I care because I want my works to be totally unrestricted, I do not want clauses that are unnecessary to me like attribution, copyleft, warranty, and any other nonsense. Attribution just leads to a mess where most people paste a thousand licenses from the dependencies they use into a file nobody is going to read. Totally worth it, right? I think getting acknowledged for your work is nice but it shouldn't be mandatory. I think that licenses should be written in plain language without legalese so anyone can understand. Or not written at all :^)
My general annoyance with this topic is because I hate the concept of copyright in general. It just introduces artificial scarcity and restricts cultural progress. But if you don't play their game and don't talk about licensing, then your work is implied to be "all rights reserved" and no one can use it. What malarkey.