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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I really like about SQLite is the fact that it is in the public domain.

But most third-party extensions, like this one, aren't. (This extension is MIT licensed.) If you think SQLite being in the public domain is a positive, then that's a positive these extensions lack.

(Or a public domain near-equivalent license like Unlicense or CC0, which contains an ultra-permissive copyright license for those jurisdictions which don't allow one to voluntarily put stuff in the public domain.)

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MIT is already an extremely permissive license. Seems kinda mean to complain that something is merely 90% good because you are comparing to something 99% good.

What sort of problems do you envisage having with an MIT license that public domain would fix?

So, if you include N different MIT-licensed libraries in your app, you have to remember to ship N different third party copyright licenses in your binary (or documentation shipping with the binary). And you need to keep an eye out if they change – if you add or remove a third party library, or if a third party library adds the name of a new contributor to its copyright notice in a newer version.

It gets even worse when you consider that there are MIT-like licenses, which can have fundamentally the same terms as MIT, but with slightly different wording. Then you can have to ship multiple variant license texts too.

Public domain (and public domain-equivalent licenses) you don't have to worry about this, because there is no requirement to include copyright notices or copy of license text.

I'm not saying you shouldn't credit people whose contributions you use, but you can make that a non-legal expectation of courtesy rather than a make-work legal requirement.

After reading SQLite's page on their public domain approach they seem to go through great lengths to make sure it stays public domain.

https://sqlite.org/copyright.html

Including having their closed contributors sign affidavits and stored in a physical location. This may be what OP is referring to.

Compare that with an MIT license with no "hardening" like affidavits so that it's easy to mutate to another license type, I can see their point.

Interesting stuff since I never knew this "public domain" approach before!

Their license text has always been my favorite (well, perhaps except for the original JSON license):

* The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of a legal notice, here is a blessing:

* May you do good and not evil.

* May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.

* May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

edit: thanks for the correction about the jquery license.

What is the original JQuery license?

Likely referring to the [JSON license](https://www.json.org/license.html) and not the jQuery license. The JSON license has this problematic (for many businesses) phrase: The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

do you have the link for the original JSON license? It looks remains only "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

That's what I was talking about. Crawford said in a talk he had to make an amended licenses for corporations (namely, IBM), who had lawyers that needed to be able to get around the evil restriction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCimLnIsDA

Thanks for the post, this made me research SQLite's public domain approach and I never heard of it before! Something I'll keep in mind moving forward as I always thought MIT was the "end all be all"

https://sqlite.org/copyright.html

A simple mnemonic device to help remember: licenses are for losers.

#VivaLaPublicDomain

By itself it is wrong. Public domain is still a license. License let you do anything is a must as copyright is granted auto. You need to license. If the public domain does not license, there is no public domain (except those fall into it after certain number of years).

You may sense why the need of effort by SQLite to confirm its public domain status and left other not compiled in.

Another issue is the free vs open source debate. Does it have to be pure. Another time but SQLite seems allow both, just not in its core.

> Public domain is still a license

If you read the CC0 – https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode – it is structured into two parts, a waiver (in section 2) and a fallback license (in section 3). The license is certainly a license, but is the waiver a license? Especially since the license, by its terms, only applies if the waiver does not – if the waiver is judged valid in some legal jurisdiction, the license does not apply.

Some of the language in section 2 could even be read as settling a trust, with the general public as the beneficiary, the copyright as the trust property, and the copyright owner as both settlor and trustee.

You don't need a license to communicate. #LibertyNotLicenses

I fear this comment will come across as pedantic, but I think it's a distinction worth highlighting. I am not a lawyer, but I care about this stuff and have studied it.

My (somewhat educated) understanding is that public domain is a rejection of copyright, and is therefore the lack of a license. Rather that saying "I'm the owner, and you can do whatever you want", it instead says "I am not the owner", and indeed, even further "No one is the owner". Naturally, this can only be said by the person who would have held the copyright, so paperwork is still necessary to show this.

Stanford[0] has a page about this that's pretty interesting (among other things, it mentions public domain works can be copyrighted again if they are gathered into collections, which I find fascinating). The intro text on public domain says this:

> The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it.

In the case of sqlite, I think it falls under "dedicated works"[1], which is one of the four ways they mention that leads to a work falling into the public domain.

[0]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/

[1]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/...

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