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Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

Government software, public domain software

Public domain software would be considered “commercial” under the DoD’s definition.

It's not the DoD definition. It's the US definition. The DoD simply tries to make that clear, because thinking "open source is not commercial" is a common misunderstanding.

Isn't all public-domain software automatically open source though?

It is. But very rarely do people publish software under the public domain. Most are under conditional licenses like MIT/BSD/GPL.

I don't think that's a full subset. Can't a developer release a binary of their software or make it available as public domain SaaS, without it being any kind of open source?

You are right. I wasn't considering binaries released to the public domain. In that case the source is not available.

As for SaaS, what is in public domain? The output of the public server? There is no public domain software runnable or compilable by a third party.

True, but there is one major prominent exception: SQLite. The author of such programs as djbdns and qmail also eventually released those under the public domain, but SQLite is under that status while still being actively developed and widely used.

Not necessarily, it's possible that somebody could release a software binary as public domain, while keeping the code private.

It seems CC0 may have simplified this now. The issue used to be that software enters the public domain after copyright expires & different countries interpret that different ways, which can become complicated without an explicit license document.

“Using CC0 for Public Domain Software” https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-...

“CC0 FAQ” https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...

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