I use Creative Commons public domain dedication[1] for some of the software I author. I am concerned that some people believe that it is impossible to permanently and/or reliably place software in public domain in some countries. It appears that while Creative Commons public domain dedication makes authors intent clear, some laws may not "support" that intent.
While I would love to hear that the above concerns are groundless, I suspect we will never know for sure. Thus, I would like to create a "safer" version of Creative Commons public domain dedication by augmenting the public domain dedication with a catch-all license: The Authors place this Software is in Public Domain. <Creative Commons public domain dedication follows> If the above Public Domain dedication is deemed invalid under any theory of law, current or future, this Software can be dealt with under any OSI-approved license, including, without limitation, BSD and MIT licenses. The above is unpolished because I am not sure it makes sense from a legal point of view. After all, the above combination contains contradictory assumptions (public domain versus copyrighted/licensed code). Specifically, - Can PD+license combination be legal? - Can a reference to "any OSI-approved license" be legal? - Is the above approach likely to make PD dedications safer? - Can such a beast be polished and eventually approved by OSI? Thanks, Alex. P.S. The reasons I would prefer _not_ to always use MIT/BSD license alone (without PD dedication) are moral/political and, hence, are beyond the scope of this mailing list. [1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3