Deliverables

Unlicensed software outside the scope of copyright protection is either public domain software (PD) or software that is non-distributed, non-licensed, and handled as an internal business trade secret.[2] Contrary to popular belief, distributed unlicensed source code (not in the public domain) is fully copyright protected, and therefore legally unusable in other projects (as no redistribution rights at all are granted by a license) until it passes into the public domain after the copyright term has expired.[3] Examples of this are unauthorized software leaks or software projects which are placed on public software repositories like GitHub without a specified license.[4][5] As voluntarily handing software into the public domain (before reaching the copyright term) is problematic in some jurisdictions (for instance the law of Germany), there are also licenses granting PD-like rights, for instance, the CC0 or WTFPL.