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Supporting the Public Domain

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Nguyen Hoang Duong edited this page Oct 4, 2019 · 3 revisions

What and Why the Public Domain?

The Public Domain refers to all creative works (photographs, paintings, software, audio recordings,...) that are not protected by copyright i.e. everyone owns them and can use them for any purpose in any way. There are many ways that a piece of work can enter the Public Domain:

  • The copyright holder decides to release the work into the Public Domain
  • The copyright has expired
  • The copyright cannot be legally applied

For the sake of this section's intended purpose, we will only talk about the decision to release something to the Public Domain.

Dedicating work to the Public Domain is somewhat similar to the act of donating. The dedicator has put time and work into his/her work, yet then decides to give it away and does not ask for any return. And who receives this gift of donation? The public. Everyone. And dedicating a piece of software to the masses is not an exception.

You might be wondering, why would someone spend a lot of time into his/her software, and then decide to give it away? Well, there are a lot of reasons. A lot of us think that software creators have to make money from their software, somehow, either by making their software paid or inflating the software with advertisements. But not everyone writes software for money.

Many students write software in order to learn how something works, and then release the software into the Public Domain so that others can learn from it.

Many developers want to do something good and don't wish to put pressure on others with conditions or restrictions, so they decide to release their software into the Public Domain.

Many unemployed individuals want to create free stuff that is beneficial to everyone, so they release their software into the Public Domain.

Of course, they all find it fun and ethical to do so, and the benefits they receive are also worth it. If you release your software into the Public Domain, what are the goods?

  • You receive love, support and encouragements from your satisfied users (don't underestimate the values of those)
  • The software is not only beneficial to you or certain people; it's beneficial to everyone
  • It's less of a burden to choose a license for your software, and you can move on to the next project
  • It's less of a burden (in fact, no burden at all) to find a compatible license for something to work with a Public Domain software
  • ...and more

We make this dedication for the benefit
of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors.
~ from The Unlicense, a public-domain-like license

How to dedicate your next software to the Public Domain

The simplest thing that you can do to give your software away to the public is by writing a short text declaration. Something as simple as this one satisfies:

I, the copyright holder of this software, release this software into the public domain.

A more formal but more complicated statement is the one that Wikipedia uses:

I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

You can, instead, license your software under a public-domain-like license. Several license options exist:

Among those three, the CC0 is the most strongly recommended license, with The Unlicense being not-so-applicable and the WTFPL being not-so-formal.

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