> If you are reading this on GitHub or some other Git repository or service, then you are looking at a mirror.
The same file from the fossil repository -
PS: He goes by Richard.
However, if you actually did acquire a license from them beforehand (when it was still theoretically free), they'd have no ground to sue and such a case brought against you would be thrown out of court immediately.
The "open legal question" of whether you can voluntarily dedicate something to the public domain does not mean there is open slather to anyone who has done it to choose what the answer to the question is. It means it is open to a judge to decide the question once and for all someday, and then that question is resolved for everyone. I don't even know if your assessment of the question's unresolved status is correct.
Jurisdictions may impose limits as to what rights can be waived via license, but those limits apply to all licenses. In other words, if a PD-style license is invalid and does not confer the right to use the software, allowing the author to sue you for using the software, then the same is true of all freeware, open source, and commercial licenses. Buying a license wouldn't magically grant you any additional rights just because you paid money.
The commercial license stuff is CYA for companies with legal departments that don't understand open source or think the words "public domain" are spooky. In practice, SQLite and anything under a similar license is basically "as free as the law lets us make it" - and if it turns out that's not very free, that means we have a bit problem with more popular licenses like BSD, MIT, and GPL.
In practice, AIUI, the finer points that are under debate depending on the jurisdiction are around things like retaining authorship and moral rights (i.e. being credited). I don't think the idea of being able to provide a piece of software for free with no restrictions on usage or modification is under any kind of serious question. And the idea of not requiring credit for derivative works is also universal in the entire copyright industry - when was the last time you saw a CD crediting the author of every single royalty-free sample used in its creation? So embedding SQLite into a piece of software is pretty uncontroversially fine.
Now if you took SQLite, changed all the licenses to say you wrote it, and tried to distribute it stand-alone like that, some jurisdictions may have a problem with that. That's where moral rights come in, and where "public domain" might not truly mean "public domain".
As long as you don't do that, you're fine.
The situation in civil law countries and especially countries that have inalienable "author's rights" is much less clear and hostile even to the SQLite copyright release.
If you can find a jurisdiction without the explicit concept of the public domain and judges and lawyers that think there is no implicit concept of the public domain and someone who can claim copyright with a straight face to code that explicitly states that the authors relinquish their claim, then I still suspect it would get thrown out of court and the claimant opening themselves to charges of criminal fraud (entrapment and extortion) or abusing the justice system for profit.
Offering this "service" seems like a great way to monetize your software, because it only hits those with overcautious legal departments that really don't care about the money, and everyone is happy: Legal gets their paperwork, company pays some amount that they don't care about, author gets money, engineers get to use it, everyone else who doesn't have a paranoid legal department gets to use it without any hurdles.
I'm pretty sure the author got sick of getting (from his perspective stupid) requests "hey you already said it's free but can you give that to us in writing, our lawyers won't let us use it otherwise" so he turned bureaucracy into money.
Edit: It's also a convenient way for companies to support the project with money. Very few companies have a "donate to this open source project" process, most have a "buy this software" process, so a company where the people using SQLite would like the company to pay for it now has a convenient way to do so.
Thanks for the blessings and the beautiful code; you really can be a poet in any language.
For example, what is good? A lot of people share concepts of what is good, but a lot of people really don't. Not because they're bad people, but because life circumstances typically go way deeper than good and evil, for instance. So--what is the author saying, really?
Subjective stuff like this isn't bad, but it does really lead directly into the deeper questions.
Also, how does one determine whether they've taken more than they've given? A lot of people are going to bring subjective past impressions into this determination, which, like good & bad above, are complex enough that you can make that take-or-give-o-meter read just about anything--and again, justify--just about anything.
So on the one hand, it's nice that it's framed as a generous blessing, and good lord does it cut right through all that stupid legal bull! And on the other hand, people who place boring, obtuse, business law terminology where this project has placed a blessing have really good reasons for doing so, as such efforts, which get at objective use cases and expectations, have helped to remediate a lot of damage done by a bit too much subjectivity and projection of expectations in our communications.
(Bless me father, for I have clause'd)
I doubt this interpretation, given SQLite's Code of Ethics (https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html). Abrahamic faiths and subjective ethics don't go well together; "I am the way, the truth, and the life" doesn't leave much room for alternatives.
Worst rule ever during a pandemic.
(PS Are you also saying they have objectively measured the existence of God, or the divinity of Christ...?)
christian existentialism is alive and well and has a loooong history.
(and john 3:16 is a lot more universalist than the people who wield it like a club seem to believe)
Anyway, I think structuring it as a blessing means that it doesn't tell us much about the author's view of ethics. Which is to say, it is so clearly just a reminder to the reader that they should be their best self, that it couldn't possibly be misinterpreted as the actual, objective legal requirements. So, those must be somewhere else, right?
The rest is also your interpretation, and the reason I say that is that you're also kind of putting yourself in the objective audience's seat in creating the interpretation. So there's still a subjective hand-wave effect.
Get into the position of somebody who has no idea what the expectations are for "never taking more than you give"--where exactly is that line supposed to be, speaking in terms of details that matter...? ...and see if you can understand what it's like to be spoken to from someone else's set of simply-expressed, vague expectations connected to exactly which ethical framework we do not really know.
If you're "average joe"ing this, that's more of a subjective demonstration of where this kind of language may feel awesome for the author or even average-yourself-speaking-about-you-personally, but for others--what about them?
IBM had the same problem, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 for the solution :)
From a way more zany far out and perhaps metaphysical perspective I mean God if he she or they exists really is the ultimate programmer crafting whole realities. Maybe there is an inherent spiritual connection in code? Even if it's just analogical
He was a very intelligent individual who’s life was ruined by mental illness. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
If some FOIA request decades down the line reveals that the CIA was actually involved, I wouldn't be surprised. MKULTRA happened after all.
Make it happen.
See the actual license here: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/LICENSE.md
"Do not murder." "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Honor all people." "Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself." "Do not return evil for evil." "Love your enemies." the list goes on..
