Trivial snippets are released under a non-permissive license

[Steeley]

After taking a look at some of the snippets, there are some really trivial examples which basically do as the product intended and they are being released under a license.

Theres a couple of important points and questions here:
1) Attempting to claim copyright under a license of a trivial implementation would be almost impossible.
2) What if I want to release under a different license? For example GPL to MIT, BSD. Is that OK? Would it be a problem?
3) Assuming 2 is OK to do, there's almost no point in having a license. Same goes for 1.
4) What if I write a piece of code, release, then find a snippet which is almost the same and released under a different license. Do I/we have a problem?

Take for example the (currently) four snippets relating to CouchDB. This covers adding, deleting and fetching records and creating a database. They are all trivial implementations and the most basic way that a newcomer to a language is going to do those operations, yet that code is being released under the GPL.

Two other examples are the "Command line arguments" and "Iterating Numeric Lists" in the Python Core section. Both are three lines long and certainly aren't the first examples of them.

I have a real world example of this. Over the weekend I wrote some code on how to add close buttons to Notebook tabs in PyGTK. In the past two days an example has appeared which was almost exactly the same. I released mine in the Public Domain, the author of their example released under GPL. Is there a conflict even though neither developer had seen each others work?

It really needs to be considered whether snippets should have a license or instead be released in the public domain.

[Manish Sinha (मनीष सिन्हा) (manishsinha)]

I too suggest to release most if not all snippets in the public domain. License doesn't mean much as you will find the same snippets scattered all over the internet.

python-snippets is actually a repo of python snippets categorized for easy use. I think it would be good, if we ask the submitters if they want the snippets under their license of public domain.

N.B.: I support Public Domain

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

If snippets are trivial, then the license probably doesn't matter much; I think you can use the code anyway, and the license would only cover the literal snippet as a whole (including the headers, formatting, comments & such). For larger snippets it might be different...

But please don't use the term "public domain", as "public domain" is defined differently depending on national laws, and some countries don't allow you to put the code fully in the public domain (according to their local definition of PD!). Something like CC0 would be a better choice, or otherwise a very permissive software license that doesn't require attribution etc. Also see the reasons why the CC0 license was created by Creative Commons at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ .