Licensing (Bash) scripts under the GPL? [closed]

Question

I've written some bash scripts (< 200 lines of code each) I wanna share with the world, but as I'm a FLOSS fan my first thought was to share them under the terms of the GPL.

But...is that nonsense? I mean, I understand why to share a whole application under the terms of the GPL, but does it make sense for such small scripts? Or would it be the best thing to share them as Public Domain, since they're nothing really special or fancy? Or is there any special kind of licensing 'treatment' for scripts out there?

I'd really appreciate some opinions on this matter, and thanks in advance.

Edit: Thanks to everyone for the answers...I wish I could accept more than one, because they all answered my question altogether!

Answer 1

It doesn't matter how trivial you believe the work to be; the question is whether it falls under copyright restriction or not. The default assumption is that yes, any creative work falls under copyright in just about any jurisdiction.

That's the same for a big program, a small script, an orchestral arrangement, or a sketch on a napkin.

In the absence of an explicit, effective grant of license, all rights are reserved to the copyright holder, which is you if you wrote it. So, like it or not, the burden of what freedoms to grant to others falls on your shoulders.

So, if you want recipients to have the essential software freedoms and know that others cannot legally block that, the only way to make that happen is to choose a free-software license and grant it effectively. The GNU GPL gives good instruction on how to apply it to a work.

Answer 2

If you donate them to the public domain, you're giving up any rights to their ownership, and you're allowing anyone to use, modify, or sell them however they please.

If you release them under GPL, you can also allow anyone to use, modify, or sell them, but you're also explicitly requiring them to provide the same unrestricted use to all "downstream" users. The spirit of GPL is that anyone who passes GPL software to anyone else must also provide the original rights and freedoms to use and further modify that software.

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Disclaimer: This is my understanding of GPL, not legal advice. Dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer, not a lawyer.

Answer 3

I love the GPL, but I have a simple rule for my own projects:

The Code should be at least one order of magnitude longer than the license

If your code is just as long as the GPL, there probably is not that much stuff in it that an evil corporation could steal, even if you license it under the MIT X11 License.

As for the question of Public Domain: I live in Germany, where the only legal way to put something in the Public Domain is to commit suicide and wait 70 years (and hope that copyright protection time doesn't get increased between now and 2080). Which is a commitment I am not wanting to make :-) So, I don't really think about that.