Comment by pessimism | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimism | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, this bears repeating:

   “Free” does not mean a single thing
   from a legal licensing perspective.

You have to include an explicit license with your “free” work, otherwise developers wouldn’t—or at least shouldn’t—touch it with a ten-foot pole.

I have agonized over this when trying to find icons I could use for my open-source GitHub project, and it wasn’t easy. When I was looking into it, I compiled a short list of great icon sets and their respective licenses to wrap my head around whether I could use them in my project at all: http://pygm.us/QRelV0PW.

As a developer, I know how hard it is to figure out how to license your work, but licensing is one of those things we really, really need to understand and come to grips with.

And don’t get me started on contributor license agreements ...

I'm not sure if this has been asked before so I apologize in advance, but is there anything wrong with releasing projects as public domain? Then I would think there is no need for licensing at all.

In the US there is no way to release it works into the public domain (unless you work for the US Government). If you wanted to be free-er than "all rights reserved" you must give it a license that says that. Without a explicit license all new works are automatically assumed copyrighted by their owner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_Sta...

In short it's not always clear that you can voluntarily abandon copyright in every countries that follow the Berne convention. It's safer to grant a liberal license.

The only problem with that is that in most jurisdictions the only way to release something into the public domain is to have died seventy years ago.

Are there any examples that show such a concern is warranted? Or where common sense did not win out?

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