On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Nikita Karetnikov nikita@karetnikov.org wrote:
There is exactly one such program: https://www.torproject.org/tordnsel/dist/
On the bright side (for you, not for us) TorBEL never replaced it. We still use TorDNSEL to generate the exit-addresses files: https://exitlist.torproject.org/
I've found out that TorDNSEL is in the public domain (see [1]). It's OK, but I'm afraid that my (future) work will be proprietarized [2]. I'd prefer to relicense the whole thing under the GPLv3+ [3]. So TorDNSEL will stay free software [2]. What do you think?
There's a tradeoff that you need to consider with licensing decisions. If you pick a permissive license, then there's a risk that somebody might do a proprietary fork. This seems to be a higher risk with some kinds of software than others: I don't personally think that there's much likelihood that somebody would try to make non-free changes to TorDNSEL. (After all, nobody has tried to make non-free changes to the current version in the past N years.)
If you pick a restrictive copyleft like one of the GPL licenses, on the other hand, then nobody can, but other free software projects that have chosen other licenses won't be able to use your code. For instance, if you pick GPLv3, then no project that links OpenSSL can use your software. If you write some interesting bit of Haskell code that a BSD-licensed Haskell project would like to use, they well probably sigh and choose not to use it, even if they would really like to.
So when you pick a copyleft-style license, you prevent non-free forks at the expense of also preventing a large number of free uses of your software.
Personally, I would leave it public domain (probably via a CC0-style statement), or put it under a permissive license (most of Tor is under 3-clause BSD). My reasoning is more or less that I don't see a big commercial market here that would *want* to rip off TorDNSEL. But this is one of those issues where reasonable people will disagree and in my opinion it's fine to let the programmers decide.
I'm not qualified to answer your legal question about the force of the public domain dedication on the code as it stands.
best wishes, -- Nick