> 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.
Right, and a judge could rule that, in fact, it is possible to arbitrarily revoke free licensing at any time.
>it would be ridiculous for a court to find otherwise
You say that, but we live in a world of ridiculous IP law.
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.
1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
Science is not something you have faith in. The entire point of science is allowing your beliefs to change when presented with evidence. That's the exact opposite of "complete trust". If anything, the only thing you need to have faith in is in the validity of your own experience - and that's a philosophical dilemma, not a scientific one.
Doing science means knowing we're probably wrong and will learn something new tomorrow - but we're probably at least a little bit right and that will have made our lives better until now.
If I remember correctly, he uses the ancient city of Rome as a symbol of the pre-Abrahamic, natural han ethic. Power is good, sex is good, wealth is good, strength is good, competence is good.
This contrasts with the Jerusalem ethic where an almighty god is worshipped, not perched on a mountain or a cloud, but while nailed to a cross. So now self-sacrifice is good, and the whole story revolves around the weak, the poor, the downtrodden.
We’re still in the Jerusalem phase, despite having replaced the church with the state. Perhaps one day, in a few millennia, the wheel will turn back around.
It’s a good book!
Christianity, including its ethics, obviously also had sources and influences. Both in its inception and as it has changed, fractured and adapted to its surroundings over time. And if you truly think that Jesus invented helping the poor and acting righteous, I can only recommend you read about religions. Both those that influenced Christianity and those that never came into contact with it.
(PS Are you also saying they have objectively measured the existence of God, or the divinity of Christ...?)
There's only one objective reality/truth, regardless of human ability to measure it. It's like arguing that the stars' existence is subjective because you can't count them.
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.
Although, attributing all the world's ills to a shadowy cabal of corrupt operatives is a pretty crazy conspiracy theory... that might just be the problem.
However, looking at how crazy society is today you can kind of understand how people would reach that conclusion..
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..
- Do not murder is a commandment Israel received on Mt. Sinai. After that Israel continued its journey to conquer the Promised Land, which involved killing a lot of people (i.e. kill != murder)
- If you think New Testament has changed this, there is an episode in the Gospel of Luke (3:14) when soldiers come to St. John the Baptist to ask how they should change their lives. Guess what - he never tells them that being a soldier (and that was voluntary at the time) and killing your country's enemies is a sin. In fact early Christianity was popular among soldiers
> the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.
According to wikipedia:
> Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought.
So if the missile was fired by people that are legally allowed to kill other people, "Do not murder" has been respected.
> Do not return evil for evil.
I feel like there is a difference between preventing someone to commit evil acts (defending yourself) and attacking them.
> Honor all people
You can honor fallen enemies.
> Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemies.
Might be a stretch, but I don't think love would prevent you from killing someone if that was necessary.
> Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself.
Presumably you would rather be killed than be allowed to murder other people.
All of that may be a bit of a stretch, I don't know much about religious doctrine. But it's still coherant with "common sense" I think.
There have been whole books written about this - though I can't blame you for not having read them, many of them are turgid in the extreme. Christian ethics aim to break cycles of recrimination and escalation, but not in general to the point of helpless passivity. Of course the strictures of just war doctrine are considerably harder to square with the de facto imperial power of a country like the United States which is practically and to some extent aspirationally similar to the Roman empire in its heyday.
For a more modern take on the ethics of warfare you might find it interesting to examine the Lieber doctrine, which was instituted during the US civil war and (nominally) still in force in many respects.
