kerravon wrote:
Wrong question. What's wrong with public domain?
The fact that, unless the code was initially under a registered copyright and
then placed in PD, then anyone who wants to can claim copyright on the program, and the actual developer would have no legal recourse - the developer would, technically speaking, be in violation of copyright on their own code.
And yes, this has happened before. It was one of the primary motivations for Richard Stallman developing the GPL in the first place.
Also, at least at the time when Stallman was first proposing the idea of placing all programs into public domain, many organizations had rules against using programs which lacked a copyright, mostly for legal CYA reasons. I don't know if this is still true anywhere, but apparently it wasn't uncommon at one time.
Placing programs in public domain was the default practice at the MIT AI lab in the 1960s and early 1970s, but that worked mainly because they were often one-off programs which were pretty much of limited interest outside the lab itself. They were happy to let others just access their code, as there were only a few hundred PDP-10 systems around in the first place. It was a matter of pride for several of the AI lab workers, including Stallman, who saw themselves in opposition to the commercial software in the mainframe world (the early home computer market, which was a mix of commercial software such as MS BASIC, and hobbyist programs mainly published in magazines such as
Byte or
Dr. Dobbs' Journal, was largely ignored by the MIT crowd at the time),
Once the programs written at the AI came to be seen as having value in themselves - largely due to the rise of the Lisp Machines, or rather, the commercial production thereof by LMI and Symbolics, and the resulting competition between the two companies - people started adding copyright notices, and even started demanding royalties. In some cases, this was on code that was written in part or in whole by someone else, as I already said. Stallman tried to convince people that software should be public domain as a matter of policy and ethics, but the lab shut him down on that, on the basis that public domain software "couldn't be trusted" or "wasn't supported", despite it being the common practice up to that point.
Public licenses aren't a good solution, but it does prevent even worse abuses. Or at least that's the theory - I don't know what, if any, legal tests have upheld the concept.