Last month, SpaceX launched its first deep space mission when the Falcon 9 rocket carried the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite into orbit.

The mission resulted in some remarkable images being made public, but it also led some commentators to note a possible downside to the new era of privately-funded space exploration. Unlike the photos produced by every NASA mission, all SpaceX photos wouldn't be in the public domain. NASA photos are generally public domain by default, since works created by the US federal government or its employees can't be copyrighted.

At the time, Mike Masnick at Techdirt wrote an open letter to Elon Musk, suggesting the best solution would be for the owner of SpaceX to simply put the images in the public domain. Musk has recognized the value of a robust public domain in other contexts, such as when he pledged not to enforce any of Tesla's patents on electric car technology.

Last week, the company responded to that concern by creating a Flickr account and releasing images under a Creative Commons license. The particular license allows for re-use but keeps some restrictions, like a ban on commercial re-use.

When Musk was asked this weekend on Twitter "Why not public domain? What is there to lose?," he responded: "Good point.. Just changed them to full public domain."

The move quickly won Musk a heap of praise on Twitter and beyond. In a strange twist to the story, the SpaceX photos aren't actually marked as public domain on Flickr—probably because there's no simple way to do so. But SpaceX has marked the photos with the least restrictive license available on the site, which is a CC-BY license that requires only attribution for any type of re-use. The Creative Commons license that's meant to release photos with no restrictions is CC-Zero, which isn't an option (yet) on Flickr.