As detailed on D.J. Bernstein's page at http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html, a lot of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about pub

As detailed on D.J. Bernstein's page at http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html, a lot of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about public domain software can be traced back to Lawrence Rosen's influential 2002 Linux Journal article "Why the Public Domain Isn't a License". (For those who may not know, Rosen is the former general counsel and secretary of OSI.) However, that article was incorrect on a number of issues, as Bernstein points out. And indeed, Rosen has last year at long last recanted his previous views on public domain software: > I have already voted +1 to approve the CC0 public domain dedication > and fallback license as OSD compliant. I admit that I have argued for > years against the "public domain" as an open source license, but in > retrospect, considering the minimal risk to developers and users > relying on such software and the evident popularity of that "license", > I changed my mind. One can't stand in the way of a fire hose of free > public domain software, even if it doesn't come with a better FOSS > license that I trust more. Source: http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-March/000345.html http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012... The "fire hose" Rosen mentions can be witnessed in action at e.g. GitHub, with volumes of code now being put into the public domain on an everyday basis: https://github.com/search?q=%22public+domain%22&type=Code&s=indexed https://github.com/search?q=%22public+domain%22&type=Code&s=...