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Even when the concept of "public domain" may not apply as such, one can create a license that effectively grants public domain rights. CC0 is an example of such a license. What SQLite is doing here is similar. Jurisdictions may impose limits as to what rights can be waived via license, but those limits apply to all licenses. In other words, if a PD-style license is invalid and does not confer the right to use the software, allowing the author to sue you for using the software, then the same is true of all freeware, open source, and commercial licenses. Buying a license wouldn't magically grant you any additional rights just because you paid money. The commercial license stuff is CYA for companies with legal departments that don't understand open source or think the words "public domain" are spooky. In practice, SQLite and anything under a similar license is basically "as free as the law lets us make it" - and if it turns out that's not very free, that means we have a bit problem with more popular licenses like BSD, MIT, and GPL. In practice, AIUI, the finer points that are under debate depending on the jurisdiction are around things like retaining authorship and moral rights (i.e. being credited). I don't think the idea of being able to provide a piece of software for free with no restrictions on usage or modification is under any kind of serious question. And the idea of not requiring credit for derivative works is also universal in the entire copyright industry - when was the last time you saw a CD crediting the author of every single royalty-free sample used in its creation? So embedding SQLite into a piece of software is pretty uncontroversially fine. Now if you took SQLite, changed all the licenses to say you wrote it, and tried to distribute it stand-alone like that, some jurisdictions may have a problem with that. That's where moral rights come in, and where "public domain" might not truly mean "public domain". As long as you don't do that, you're fine. |