standalone public-domain rationale document

docs/why_public_domain.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+My collected rationales for placing these libraries
+in the public domain:
+
+1. Public domain vs. viral licenses
+
+Why is this library public domain?
+Because more people will use it. Because it's not viral, people are
+not obligated to give back, so you could argue that it hurts the
+development of it, and then because it doesn't develop as well it's
+not as good, and then because it's not as good, in the long run
+maybe fewer people will use it. I have total respect for that
+opinion, but I just don't believe it myself for most software.
+
+2. Public domain vs. attribution-required licenses
+
+The primary difference between public domain and, say, a Creative Commons
+commercial / non-share-alike / attribution license is solely the
+requirement for attribution. (Similarly the BSD license and such.)
+While I would *appreciate* acknowledgement and attribution, I believe
+that it is foolish to place a legal encumberment (i.e. a license) on
+the software *solely* to get attribution.
+
+In other words, I'm arguing that PD is superior to the BSD license and
+the Creative Commons 'Attribution' license. If the license offers
+anything besides attribution -- as does, e.g., CC NonCommercial-ShareAlike,
+or the GPL -- that's a separate discussion.
+
+3. Other aspects of BSD-style licenses besides attribution
+
+Permissive licenses like zlib and BSD license are perfectly reasonable
+in their requirements, but they are very wordy and
+have only two benefits over public domain: legally-mandated
+attribution and liability-control. I do not believe these
+are worth the excessive verbosity and user-unfriendliness
+these licenses induce, especially in the single-file
+case where those licenses tend to be at the top of
+the file, the first thing you see.
+
+To the specific points, I have had no trouble receiving
+attribution for my libraries; liability in the face of
+no explicit disclaimer of liability is an open question,
+but one I have a lot of difficulty imagining there being
+any actual doubt about in court. Sometimes I explicitly
+note in my libraries that I make no guarantees about them
+being fit for purpose, but it's pretty absurd to do this;
+as a whole, it comes across as "here is a library to decode
+vorbis audio files, but it may not actually work and if
+you have problems it's not my fault, but also please
+report bugs so I can fix them".