Has anyone heard of any issues using SQLite in jurisdictions without a concept of the public domain? The copyright page [1] seems to imply that you'd need to buy a license from Hwaci.
However, if you actually did acquire a license from them beforehand (when it was still theoretically free), they'd have no ground to sue and such a case brought against you would be thrown out of court immediately.
The "open legal question" of whether you can voluntarily dedicate something to the public domain does not mean there is open slather to anyone who has done it to choose what the answer to the question is. It means it is open to a judge to decide the question once and for all someday, and then that question is resolved for everyone. I don't even know if your assessment of the question's unresolved status is correct.
Right, and a judge could rule that, in fact, it is possible to arbitrarily revoke free licensing at any time.
>it would be ridiculous for a court to find otherwise
You say that, but we live in a world of ridiculous IP law.
On the basis of what law or treaty? First of all, dedication is not "free licensing". It is not licensing in any sense whatsoever. When you dedicate the work, you are no longer the holder, hence public domain is also what works fall into when the author is long dead. I'm not sure what piece of law you'd be re-interpreting to reverse all of that understanding, which would be a precondition to allowing dedicators to retain any control whatsoever over a work that's currently in the public domain.
Your original point was better, if it is ruled that "dedication to the public domain" is not and has never been a real thing, then the original dedications never took effect, and copyright holders remained copyright holders instead of forfeiting all control. Stick to that one.
I wonder how courts know how to distinguish between "I dedicate this work to..."
- "my wonderful husband"
- "my devoted readers"
- "the revolution in $COUNTRY"
- "the public domain".
Or perhaps there's no distinction and you all owe me copyright fees for those worjs dedicated to me as a devoted reader.
Jurisdictions may impose limits as to what rights can be waived via license, but those limits apply to all licenses. In other words, if a PD-style license is invalid and does not confer the right to use the software, allowing the author to sue you for using the software, then the same is true of all freeware, open source, and commercial licenses. Buying a license wouldn't magically grant you any additional rights just because you paid money.
The commercial license stuff is CYA for companies with legal departments that don't understand open source or think the words "public domain" are spooky. In practice, SQLite and anything under a similar license is basically "as free as the law lets us make it" - and if it turns out that's not very free, that means we have a bit problem with more popular licenses like BSD, MIT, and GPL.
In practice, AIUI, the finer points that are under debate depending on the jurisdiction are around things like retaining authorship and moral rights (i.e. being credited). I don't think the idea of being able to provide a piece of software for free with no restrictions on usage or modification is under any kind of serious question. And the idea of not requiring credit for derivative works is also universal in the entire copyright industry - when was the last time you saw a CD crediting the author of every single royalty-free sample used in its creation? So embedding SQLite into a piece of software is pretty uncontroversially fine.
Now if you took SQLite, changed all the licenses to say you wrote it, and tried to distribute it stand-alone like that, some jurisdictions may have a problem with that. That's where moral rights come in, and where "public domain" might not truly mean "public domain".
As long as you don't do that, you're fine.
The situation in civil law countries and especially countries that have inalienable "author's rights" is much less clear and hostile even to the SQLite copyright release.
At that point you rely on a statement that is not legally binding and could be changed at any time. Wouldn't be the first time a software dev. rage quit and decided to go scorched earth on his projects.
If you can find a jurisdiction without the explicit concept of the public domain and judges and lawyers that think there is no implicit concept of the public domain and someone who can claim copyright with a straight face to code that explicitly states that the authors relinquish their claim, then I still suspect it would get thrown out of court and the claimant opening themselves to charges of criminal fraud (entrapment and extortion) or abusing the justice system for profit.
Offering this "service" seems like a great way to monetize your software, because it only hits those with overcautious legal departments that really don't care about the money, and everyone is happy: Legal gets their paperwork, company pays some amount that they don't care about, author gets money, engineers get to use it, everyone else who doesn't have a paranoid legal department gets to use it without any hurdles.
I'm pretty sure the author got sick of getting (from his perspective stupid) requests "hey you already said it's free but can you give that to us in writing, our lawyers won't let us use it otherwise" so he turned bureaucracy into money.
Edit: It's also a convenient way for companies to support the project with money. Very few companies have a "donate to this open source project" process, most have a "buy this software" process, so a company where the people using SQLite would like the company to pay for it now has a convenient way to do so.