[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.