Providing source code as public domain

Question

One question was so interesting that I worked out a solution as program. While I would like to share it, I am not happy with the Creative Commons License. I have read the already existing posts and I find the legal problems as much too unspecified and problematic (When it is code, when a snippet, does other laws apply to me etc. etc.)

I would prefer to offer it as Public Domain. No restrictions at all, no enforced copyleft, no need to tag me as author. The opportunity to get rich by exploiting me, you name it. ;-)

As the idea of the Creative Commons is that content will be available on SO even if the author later disagrees, I see no conflict with this goal because releasing all rights would automatically give SO the right to retain and modify the code.

So, is it possible to post this code under Public Domain ? Or use less restrictive licenses in general ? I think (hopefully) that many people here would like to share their code and snippets as Public Domain, too.

Answer 1

There's no problem at all with you posting your own code somewhere else and explicitly placing it into the public domain. Such dual licenses are quite common. There's no mechanism for licensing different bits as posted on the SE network, but if you distribute the code through your own channel, you may do it however you wish.

Answer 2

Anything you produce, you own the copyright to. You can release that to the public under whichever license(s) you wish. (Note the potential plural.) By posting it on SO, you release it under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. There’s nothing stopping you also releasing it under CC0 or WTFPL (or both).

Or you can “release it to the public domain” (possibly). As the FAQ for the WTFPL says,

Unfortunately, the definition of public domain varies with the jurisdictions, and it is in some places debatable whether someone who has not been dead for the last seventy years is entitled to put their own work in the public domain.

Wikipedia has a template for that: PD-Self:

I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so:
I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

This seems reasonable. And I don’t see why you’d need to host it elsewhere to put such a license on it. There's nothing stopping you putting some code here with a comment at the top:

// License: WTFPL (http://www.wtfpl.net)

That’d be sufficient.

Alternatively, you could put a note in your profile to the effect that all your code snippets on this site are available under such-and-such a licence.

_{(This answer is licensed under both CC0 and WTFPL.)}