On Fri, October 7, 2011 14:17, David Braverman wrote:
Um...a statement in a creative work that says "this work is in the public domain" generally *does* put it in the public domain. Anyone who owns property is free to give it away.
Not necessarily true in parts of Europe. The author of SQLite learned this the hard way, as it too was put in the public domain, and this fact led to complicates with some European companies using it having to jump a legal hoops. I forget the exact details now, but I believe it's mentioned in this Google TechTalk video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giAMt8Tj-84 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5160435487953918649 The author said if he had to do it again, he'd go with something like an MIT license: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License The original Berkeley Unix code was also sponsored by the US government, and it was published with the (four-clause) BSD license. The various BSD projects have been moving over to three- and two-clause licenses in recent years (most prominently removing the advertising clause). IMHO if one wants to simply give away code with the fewest hassles/strings, the MIT license is probably best.