Thoughts on code ownership for small scripts

I feel that using anything but CC0[1] (or 0BSD[2]) public domain license in my dotfiles and shell scripts is kinda arrogant.

1: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

2: https://opensource.org/license/0bsd

It's not likely anyone is going to use that code in major or production projects, so there is no reason I should require attribution or copyleft.

It would be different if I were writing a software project, like an IRC client, a text editor, or some kind of networking utility, that I expect people to use. Then I'd want some kind of GPL.

Maybe I'm overthinking this a little, but I also feel like the concepts and idioms of the code I write cannot really be *owned* by anyone in the copyright sense. They are just like little tools that anyone can write themselves when thinking about the problem a certain way. I see this as similar to how we can't really own (culturally relative) social scripts. But if it's a clever or original use of language constructs, then I'd say attribution or copyright is appropriate.

Anyway, that's my take. It's just whatever.

END

Last updated: 2026-05-09

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