I am aware of some of the problems of the concept of “releasing a work to the public domain” (as mentioned here and here; I haven’t listened to this specific discussion yet). IANAL, but the main problems seem to be as follows:
- Releasing to the public domain doesn’t exist in many jurisdictions; rather, a work becomes public domain after copyright expires.
- Some moral rights are inalienable due to (certain ratifications of) article 6bis of the Berne Convention.
However, aren’t you still allowed to publish a work anonymously? If you anonymously publish a work, in such a way that authorship can’t be proven or even distinguished, wouldn’t that effectively “unlicense” your code? I would think so: since then any claim of authorship can’t be validated, the rights implied by authorship can’t be enforced, not even by the original author.
If so, I’d really like to know which permissive license (ISC/MIT/BSD-style) would be fit for such publications. (Especially when they’ve managed to get rid of the lengthy THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED IN "SCREAMING CAPS"-style liability waiver.) If no such license exists yet, how would one modify an existing license to be suitable for an anonymous publication?
3
I would have a read of FSF’s thoughts on categories of software. To give credit, the link is also included in the SO discussion you linked to.
Western world use of the term “public domain” correlates with what FSF terms noncopylefted free software. In this case, free means no copyright associated to it as the author has disclaimed their copyright. The noncopylefted aspect means there aren’t any distribution restrictions. So the software is truly Free as well as “free as in beer”. Editorial aside, copyleft software isn’t truly Free since it has distribution restrictions.
Releasing the software anonymously may actually backfire for what you’re intending to do. Precisely because we don’t know who wrote the anonymous software, we cannot ascertain that they have disclaimed their claim to copyright. Just because it is “anonymous” doesn’t mean that a future user would be protected from nuisance claims of “that’s really my code that I was releasing under the pseudonym of ‘anonymous'” And yes, there’s more than a few folk going around by the handle of anonymous.
Instead of following an anonymous route, I think you would be better off by saying I am Tinctorius and I wrote this code. This code is free to use however you wish and I explicitly disclaim my copyright to this code.
4
This is an old question, but for anyone still curious, federal software development team 18F uses the CC0 1.0 license to waive all rights to the software they create. You can see a copy of their standard license template on GitHub. It contains language such as this:
The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.