[bragr]

>This version is also dedicated to the public domain

IANAL but under US copyright law this is a meaningless statement as it's not possible to disclaim ownership. You can only permissively license - though reading the LICENSE file, this is what they are doing in practice.

[saagarjha]

I thought that was a problem for other countries? In the US I’m pretty sure dedicating something to the public domain actually places it there.

[bragr]

Nope. I think people are misunderstanding the difference between courts interpreting "putting something in the public domain" as a permissive license and actually severing the copyright from your legal person. There's no current provision for severing those rights under the current law so it may be possible for them (or their heirs) to claw a work back from the public domain using copyright termination/relicensing provisions of the law [1].

The way copyright termination works is a big risk to opensource either way because in theory any open source license could be revoked after enough decades.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/23/why-we-still-cant-really...

[CorrectHorseBat]

Afaik it's Germany (and maybe some othes) where that is an issue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#cite_ref-CC0_5...

[naniwaduni]

I'm not sure I'd like to meet the court that wouldn't see a public domain dedication and round it up to a maximally permissive license if it ever came up anyway.

[t-3]

Considering that this is source-available software used for building other software, license is near meaningless anyway. Who distributes their build toolchain?

[klez]

> Who distributes their build toolchain?

Operating Systems, for one.