[mariuskempe]

The Unlicense - http://unlicense.org. Put your software into the public domain, forget about all legal complexity. And this way people can reuse your code in the most hassle-free way possible.

Also, keep in mind - no matter which software license you choose, your code will go into the public domain eventually.

[wmf]

Public domain, unlicensing, the wtf license, etc. create legal hassles instead of avoiding them, because many people have a short list of preapproved licenses that they understand and these aren't on the list. And companies with legal departments generally don't want to touch these licenses.

[mariuskempe]

I do know where you're coming from, but SQLite, which is in the public domain, is by far the most deployed SQL implementation, and most of those deployments are by companies - big companies, even.

Also, by your logic, nobody should ever have used the GPL when it was new-fangled.

[DamonOehlman]

I'm amazed that I haven't heard of unlicense.org before - I think it's definitely worth considering. I really don't have the need to have copyright notices maintained in what I write, so from a personal perspective it's completely compatible.

So when you release software to the public domain, do you still use the words "open source". I'm just mindful that corporate customers have reached a level of comfort around the term "open source" and may not have the same comfort around public domain.

It looks like the SQLite guys have a pretty good way of handling the situation though:

http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

[mariuskempe]

Sure - open source is about source-code availability, public domain is about the legal status of that source code - as free as can be.