Yet another effort at translating the Win32 API headers

[Bastiaan Veelo]

Kyle Furlong wrote:
> J C Calvarese wrote:
>> What's freer than releasing it as public domain? Public domain would 
>> be my
>> preference if it were my choice.
>>
>> jcc7
> 
> 
> The problem with releasing anything into the public domain is that 
> eventually it becomes ambiguous that it IS public domain. People drop 
> the work anywhere and however they please, and somewhere down the line 
> someone asks, "Hey what is the licensing of such and such." If the 
> project is inactive its easy for this ambiguity to arise. Thus, having 
> an explicit license which stipulates that use of the work is completely 
> free, and that copies of the license must be distributed with the work 
> avoid this.

And, releasing in the public domain seems to be problematic in itself, 
at least in some countries. In the Ares 0.15 release thread I wrote:

It appears you cannot simply donate files to the public domain.
According to Lawrence Rosen [1], an attorney who served for many years
as general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative, "there
is no accepted way to dedicate an original work of authorship to the
public domain before the copyright term for that work expires. A license
is the only recognized way to authorize others to undertake the authors’
exclusive copyright rights." This is the raison d'être of all-permissive
licenses like MIT, BSD etc.

[1] Lawrence Rosen, 2004, "Open Source Licensing -- Software Freedom and
Intellectual Property Law", Prentice Hall, New Yersey, page 74,
http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch05.pdf