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+My collected rationales for placing these libraries
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+in the public domain:
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+
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+1. Public domain vs. viral licenses
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+
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+Why is this library public domain?
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+Because more people will use it. Because it's not viral, people are
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+not obligated to give back, so you could argue that it hurts the
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+development of it, and then because it doesn't develop as well it's
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+not as good, and then because it's not as good, in the long run
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+maybe fewer people will use it. I have total respect for that
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+opinion, but I just don't believe it myself for most software.
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+
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+2. Public domain vs. attribution-required licenses
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+
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+The primary difference between public domain and, say, a Creative Commons
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+commercial / non-share-alike / attribution license is solely the
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+requirement for attribution. (Similarly the BSD license and such.)
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+While I would *appreciate* acknowledgement and attribution, I believe
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+that it is foolish to place a legal encumberment (i.e. a license) on
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+the software *solely* to get attribution.
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+
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+In other words, I'm arguing that PD is superior to the BSD license and
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+the Creative Commons 'Attribution' license. If the license offers
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+anything besides attribution -- as does, e.g., CC NonCommercial-ShareAlike,
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+or the GPL -- that's a separate discussion.
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+
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+3. Other aspects of BSD-style licenses besides attribution
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+
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+Permissive licenses like zlib and BSD license are perfectly reasonable
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+in their requirements, but they are very wordy and
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+have only two benefits over public domain: legally-mandated
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+attribution and liability-control. I do not believe these
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+are worth the excessive verbosity and user-unfriendliness
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+these licenses induce, especially in the single-file
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+case where those licenses tend to be at the top of
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+the file, the first thing you see.
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+
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+To the specific points, I have had no trouble receiving
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+attribution for my libraries; liability in the face of
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+no explicit disclaimer of liability is an open question,
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+but one I have a lot of difficulty imagining there being
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+any actual doubt about in court. Sometimes I explicitly
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+note in my libraries that I make no guarantees about them
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+being fit for purpose, but it's pretty absurd to do this;
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+as a whole, it comes across as "here is a library to decode
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+vorbis audio files, but it may not actually work and if
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+you have problems it's not my fault, but also please
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+report bugs so I can fix them".
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Sean Barrett