Wanted to wish everyone a belated Happy Public Domain Day. Beyond 40 is having a virtual meeting today (January 4th) to talk about the Public Domain, Creative Commons and the upcoming Document Freedom Day 2026. More details here: https://gath.io/XDKJ66FYl2ABCs2B1FktE Hope some of you can join us. Also wanted to take this opportunity to discuss some of the great public domain source code resources available out there. I have a list of them if anyone is interested in checking it out. Would love to hear about your favorite public domain source code projects. I think projects libtom or some of the pd single source header files can be very useful in certain types of FLOSS projects. Have you used any public domain code in your own projects?
You are talking about using code libraries rather than just using binaries of programs.
One of the best resources I used was the code in the book “Numerical Recipes”
The original book that I used was Fortran, then there were C and Pascal versions. I see that there is now C÷÷ version.
Having the documentation as a book was a step above any online libraries.
Other code libraries I have used are
- the R packages
- IBM SSP library (scientific subroutine package)
- Netlib
- Linpack
- Lapack
- BLAS
- libvips. C image processing library
- EISPACK. Eigenvalue routines
I have benefited greatly from public domain code.
I would be interested to see your list
It is interesting that IBM was once a leading supplier of public domain scientific software.
I was referring to public domain source code not binaries. Here’s a list of some of the ones I’ve found to date: Captcha Check
All those libraries I mentioned are source code. The scientific computing world was into open source right from the beginning of computing.
but
I can see that you are interested in lower level code.
Those are great libraries. Just thought it would be fun for the Public Domain Day celebration to share code that is specifically listed as in the pubic domain or licensed with licenses similar to the public domain such as CC0. With public domain code, you can use it however you want and don’t even need to credit the author unless you want to. The complexity of public domain code can vary greatly from a single header file all the way to an operating system that is completely in the public domain.
I did not know that ‘public domain’ was a recognised category.
It must be similar go a BSD licence.?
My own code is GPL or unspecified
Should I consider making it public domain?
Public Domain, BSD 0 clause and CC0 are similar. You can see CC0 for more details on pros and cons of that type of license: CC0 - Creative Commons You can find a good list of available Free, Libre, Open Source licenses at Licenses – Open Source Initiative If you’re using GPL, I’d recommend continuing to use GPL or possibly LGPL especially if making sure your code stays open and accessible even when others modify it is important to you. I typically use a BSD 2 clause license because that’s what resonated for me. One needs to be careful with some of the BSD licenses like the 4 clause and certain other licenses as they may not be compatible with GPL projects. Picking the right license for a project really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with that license and how many rights you want to keep or give away. Public Domain is more often in conjunction with books and multimedia works and isn’t as common in source code except among public domain enthusiasts. Internet Library does an event for Public Domain Day every year that introduces multimedia works entering the public domain. It’s usually a very nice event.
I think I agree. Thank you.