stb/docs/why_public_domain.md

   1 My collected rationales for placing these libraries
   2 in the public domain:
   3
   4 1. Public domain vs. viral licenses
   5
   6   Why is this library public domain?
   7   Because more people will use it. Because it's not viral, people are
   8   not obligated to give back, so you could argue that it hurts the
   9   development of it, and then because it doesn't develop as well it's
  10   not as good, and then because it's not as good, in the long run
  11   maybe fewer people will use it. I have total respect for that
  12   opinion, but I just don't believe it myself for most software.
  13
  14 2. Public domain vs. attribution-required licenses
  15
  16   The primary difference between public domain and, say, a Creative Commons
  17   commercial / non-share-alike / attribution license is solely the
  18   requirement for attribution. (Similarly the BSD license and such.)
  19   While I would *appreciate* acknowledgement and attribution, I believe
  20   that it is foolish to place a legal encumberment (i.e. a license) on
  21   the software *solely* to get attribution.
  22
  23   In other words, I'm arguing that PD is superior to the BSD license and
  24   the Creative Commons 'Attribution' license. If the license offers
  25   anything besides attribution -- as does, e.g., CC NonCommercial-ShareAlike,
  26   or the GPL -- that's a separate discussion.
  27
  28 3. Other aspects of BSD-style licenses besides attribution
  29
  30   Permissive licenses like zlib and BSD license are perfectly reasonable
  31   in their requirements, but they are very wordy and
  32   have only two benefits over public domain: legally-mandated
  33   attribution and liability-control. I do not believe these
  34   are worth the excessive verbosity and user-unfriendliness
  35   these licenses induce, especially in the single-file
  36   case where those licenses tend to be at the top of
  37   the file, the first thing you see.
  38
  39   To the specific points, I have had no trouble receiving
  40   attribution for my libraries; liability in the face of
  41   no explicit disclaimer of liability is an open question,
  42   but one I have a lot of difficulty imagining there being
  43   any actual doubt about in court. Sometimes I explicitly
  44   note in my libraries that I make no guarantees about them
  45   being fit for purpose, but it's pretty absurd to do this;
  46   as a whole, it comes across as "here is a library to decode
  47   vorbis audio files, but it may not actually work and if
  48   you have problems it's not my fault, but also please
  49   report bugs so I can fix them"--so dumb!
  50
  51 4. full discussion from stb_howto.txt on what YOU should do for YOUR libs
  52
  53 ```
  54 EASY-TO-COMPLY LICENSE
  55
  56 I make my libraries public domain. You don't have to.
  57 But my goal in releasing stb-style libraries is to
  58 reduce friction for potential users as much as
  59 possible. That means:
  60
  61   a. easy to build (what this file is mostly about)
  62   b. easy to invoke (which requires good API design)
  63   c. easy to deploy (which is about licensing)
  64
  65 I choose to place all my libraries in the public
  66 domain, abjuring copyright, rather than license
  67 the libraries. This has some benefits and some
  68 drawbacks.
  69
  70 Any license which is "viral" to modifications
  71 causes worries for lawyers, even if their programmers
  72 aren't modifying it.
  73
  74 Any license which requires crediting in documentation
  75 adds friction which can add up. Valve used to have
  76 a page with a list of all of these on their web site,
  77 and it was insane, and obviously nobody ever looked
  78 at it so why would you care whether your credit appeared
  79 there?
  80
  81 Permissive licenses like zlib and BSD license are
  82 perfectly reasonable, but they are very wordy and
  83 have only two benefits over public domain: legally-mandated
  84 attribution and liability-control. I do not believe these
  85 are worth the excessive verbosity and user-unfriendliness
  86 these licenses induce, especially in the single-file
  87 case where those licenses tend to be at the top of
  88 the file, the first thing you see. (To the specific
  89 points, I have had no trouble receiving attribution
  90 for my libraries; liability in the face of no explicit
  91 disclaimer of liability is an open question.)
  92
  93 However, public domain has frictions of its own, because
  94 public domain declarations aren't necessary recognized
  95 in the USA and some other locations. For that reason,
  96 I recommend a declaration along these lines:
  97
  98 // This software is dual-licensed to the public domain and under the following
  99 // license: you are granted a perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, modify,
 100 // publish, and distribute this file as you see fit.
 101
 102 I typically place this declaration at the end of the initial
 103 comment block of the file and just say 'public domain'
 104 at the top.
 105
 106 I have had people say they couldn't use one of my
 107 libraries because it was only "public domain" and didn't
 108 have the additional fallback clause, who asked if
 109 I could dual-license it under a traditional license.
 110
 111 My answer: they can create a derivative work by
 112 modifying one character, and then license that however
 113 they like. (Indeed, *adding* the zlib or BSD license
 114 would be such a modification!) Unfortunately, their
 115 lawyers reportedly didn't like that answer. :(
 116 ```