I mean "politics" in the sense that the MIT license is concise, unlike the GPL.

The phrase "public domain" is even more concise.

Unfortunately, it's also legally questionable in a great number of jurisdictions, so you have to use the MIT license instead.

Perhaps we can have a "public domain license," then. Attaching it to a project would go something like: "This software is in the public domain, as that term is defined under USC yadda-yadda. If your local law does not define the term similarly, then consider the conditions of USC yadda-yadda to be the terms of the license of this software to you."

That would actually pretty close to the MIT license, in practice. There are major benefits to not inventing yet-another-license, and using something that everyone is already familiar with.

There are several licenses which attempt to imitate or facilitate public domain status already, most notably Creative Common's CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0) and the WTFPL (http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/).

Check out SQLite's license. IIRC, that is in the public domain.

Yes, but on its license page (http://sqlite.org/copyright.html), it has a section for how to obtain a different license for people "are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the right of an author to dedicate their work to the public domain" (among other things).

Also, I've commented elsewhere in thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783320) about problems releasing it into the public domain has caused him.

I didn't know that, but that's exactly the reason that I pointed in the direction of SQLite. I knew it was 'in the public domain', and that their 'full license' would probably have some sort of solution to issues like this.

Obviously this issue is complex enough that they have a page devoted to it.

Right. Specifically, it's the intersection of a public domain license and a program that gets a lot of commercial use (esp. embedded in devices). I know of some other public domain programs (off the top of my head: several of lhf's libraries for Lua), but nothing else that has had the license carefully scrutinized for commercial use.

I'm quite sure I read an interview or maybe just a mailing list posting where the author of sqlite (D. Richard Hipp) said that he in someway regretted releasing sqlite in the public domain, or at least if he knew what he knows now about the legal issues surrounding public domain he might reconsider. I can't find it. Does anybody else remember reading something similar or did I just imagine it?

I don't know of any written interviews or mailing list posts offhand, but I linked (elsewhere in this this discussion) to a Google tech talk in which he mentions it. It isn't really detailed, just an "Oh man, I thought that would have made things simple, but actually..." sort of aside. The interview/post probably has more info.

I think you are correct in identifying a conflation of eula with copyright. In fact I don't understand why the link to djb is there at all, even given that conflation.