I was emailed recently by someone authoring testcases. Such files can often be just one or two lines long, and so having a 30-line tri-license block in them seems overkill. They asked if it were possible to simply put them in the public domain.
After consultation with lawyers, we’ve agreed that it’s fine for people writing testcases and other such fairly trivial code to use the following 2-line boilerplate (with appropriate comment characters):
Any copyright is dedicated to the Public Domain. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
I hope that makes some people’s lives simpler :-)
So have you placed that licence text in the public domain? Or do you grant me a non-exclusive right to reproduce it for non-commercial purposes? ;)
Ksero: There’s no creative content in the boilerplate text, so it’s not copyrightable. It’s a statement of fact.
Whilst that license is effective at relinquishing rights over the published work, it doesn’t limit liability for defects. This is relevant in some jurisdictions, and is why I think a simple license like the BSD or MIT license is generally more suitable.