> How about no licence at all – that is, putting software into the public domain?<p>First, that's not "no license at all" -- a public domain release identifies the copyright holder of the released code, and people don't have unlimited rights to public domain code. There are still license terms at work.<p>Second, this scheme would allow people to incorporate public domain code into their projects without sharing their derived version -- meaning it privatizes public code and would increase the percentage of code that's proprietary and inaccessible.<p>The advantage of open source licenses is that it requires those who use open-source code to open their source as well. Public domain "licenses" eliminate this requirement.