Agreed. The simplest thing to do would have been to dedicate to public domain (creative commons zero license) - https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Could you please expand on this a little bit ? CC0 is not only public domain dedication, it has terms for "when public domain dedication isn't possible, here's a list of things that are possible"
By doing so, he doesn't give up any (exclusive) rights he has as an author. It's not the best from a user's perspective, but it's the simplest and most conservative from an author's perspective (short of not releasing the code at all).
See OSI's comments on why it hasn't been approved here -