A friend once released a fairly popular program into the public domain. He was a radical open sourcerer and so he thought it would be a grand gesture. He told

A friend once released a fairly popular program into the public domain. He was a radical open sourcerer and so he thought it would be a grand gesture. He told me he regrets it. Not releasing it for free but putting it into the public domain. He had zero control over it and that would come back to bite him. His biggest problem was that a number of people would produce their own versions. Sometimes they were improving it but sometimes they were just inserting malware. He could do nothing. To make matters worse, his name was still all over the code. (As it should be.) So he continued to get support requests and he often had trouble answering them because he had no clue about the proliferation of versions. The malware just made things worse. He came away feeling that maintaining a fully-licensed tree on GitHub (or elsewhere) is kind of the right mix.