I am about to publish my long year project and have not yet choosen a licence. Anyone should be free to use it, for any purpose. (So definitely no copyleft licence)
But why should I use any licence at all and not skip all this alltogether and choose the public domain?
I mean, I still want the credit (and donations) directed towards me. But in my understanding there is not really a difference? Fraud happens with proper licensed projects, too (when some shady website repackages vlc for example and sells it as theirs or redirect donations) and claiming ownership of something you do not own is fraud either way? So what is the advantage of a common OSS licence, except the overhead of long license text (with maybe my name and email) to be included everywhere?
Am I missing something important?
The reason, for me, is almost entirely pragmatic. Copyright and licensing are protections, but in today's world, receiving the benefit of that protection requires a budget, a lawyer, and a willingness to undertake legal proceedings which could take years to resolve.
If I am willing to invest in (1) registering my copyrights, which in the US is the only way to receive damages, (2) ongoing and perpetual searches to make sure no-one has violated my copyrights or licensing, (3) the costs to have one or more lawyers write letters, sue, and defend the suit in court against a likely large corporation who will spend millions to delay the case and bankrupt me, then I absolutely should put a license on my work and actively engage with my copyright.
If I'm not, regardless of whether I cannot afford to or do not desire to make a lawsuit my life's work, then I should opt out of the entire system. That is usually my choice.
( As a further note, Yale Law professor Stephen Carter argues that there's a fourth condition there: (4) if I'm willing to kill someone to enforce a legal verdict in my favor. See the quote in https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci... )
2) I'm not entirely sure why you're against copyleft. There's no legitimate reason not to distribute source code and this keeps the things you write from being used to hurt people. If you're concerned about people repackaging and selling your stuff then the GPLv2/3 is probably a good idea.
Just because fraud happens doesn't mean you should throw your hands up in the air and give up. If you choose ISC you can monitor GitHub and other services to see who's copying your code without giving credit and then set them straight.
It should also be noted that public domain is sometimes treated as suspect, because there's been instances where people have chosen public domain because they didn't actually invent the code or the math or the algorithms, and felt that stamping their name on it and demanding credit would actually put them at risk of being sued by the actual copyright or patent holders, which effectively punts the burden of tracing down the works provenance to the user.
He told me he regrets it. Not releasing it for free but putting it into the public domain. He had zero control over it and that would come back to bite him. His biggest problem was that a number of people would produce their own versions. Sometimes they were improving it but sometimes they were just inserting malware. He could do nothing.
To make matters worse, his name was still all over the code. (As it should be.) So he continued to get support requests and he often had trouble answering them because he had no clue about the proliferation of versions. The malware just made things worse.
He came away feeling that maintaining a fully-licensed tree on GitHub (or elsewhere) is kind of the right mix.
because the various legal systems regarding copyright are a abomination, that simply do not allow me legally to waive my rights.
CC0 claims to waive my rights to the fullest extend, but reserves my right to file a patent. Not what I want.
The closest seems the unlicence:
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Unlicense
(but it seems not recommended by GNU, for whatever reason - they recommend the CC0 instead)
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Unlicense
This is annoying because I just want to make it clear and simple for anyone without doubt, that my project shall be free for any use, any time. A layperson cannot divide between all the various GPL, LGPL, MIT, etc.
So unlicence is my current favorite, until I find the caveat.