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The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

123 points by chrismorgan 5y ago

draw_down 5y ago
bytesandbots 5y ago
I agree that the name is atrocious. I was running `npm init` recently on a new private project, I meant to write UNLICENSED which means "all rights reserved", but I accidentally missed the "d" at end and it got marked with "Unlicense" license.
- contravariant 5y ago
  Does anyone have the legal knowledge to say how bad it is when your license can't be distinguished from a simple typo?
chayleaf 5y ago
0BSD is nice as well. As a bonus, it's the only PD-equivalent license allowed in Google.
- contravariant 5y ago
  Arguably allowing your work to be used by anyone except Google is a feature not a bug.
  - Bostonian 5y ago
    You publish open source code so that others can benefit from it, and if Google uses it maybe billions of people will benefit from it, so I disagree.
    - i80and 5y ago
      This is an individual choice; people have motivations beyond "maximize usage of my code".
    - maeln 5y ago
      Everyone has different reason to publish their code using open-source license. I like sharing my code but I don't like when multi-billion dollar company make a profit from it for example. Ofc, that's what I agreed to when I release my code under open-source license, but we are all free to have different sentiment about it.
  - 683686285 5y ago
    I assume Google's legal department is not irrational and that they are worrying about something that could happen to anyone.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      Hum... Rational (from the point of view of the entire enterprise) bureaucracy bodies probably exist, but they are not common. But that second part "something that could happen to anyone" is completely unfounded. It may be because of something that could happen to you, or it may not. There is no reason to assume either way. As people keep ignoring on the context of software architecture, you are not Google.
- freemint 5y ago
  A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Good call. I had somehow quite forgotten about it, though I know I read all the N-clause BSD variants a decade or so ago. I’ve added a section at the end with that as an alternative recommendation.
- Jach 5y ago
  Google uses Sqlite, which is simply public domain. Did someone at Google actually purchase one of their pseudo-license 'warranty of title' documents they offer for companies (supposedly mostly in other countries that officially don't recognize PD grants) with more legal budget than sense? Google also uses SBCL, which is mostly public domain "in jurisdictions where this is possible, or under the FreeBSD licence where not." Does the entry for it in the list of third party software say Google is using it under the FreeBSD license or PD? (They also employ at least one developer who is a core maintainer on the side.) The legal department's default answer is "no" to anything they haven't already said "yes" to, so it wouldn't surprise me if your default options are limited. But presumably with useful enough software under other PD-equivalent things they could be forced to say "yes". As an aside I'd be very interested to know the extent of internal audits Google does on its code for legal risks in un-cleared-by-legal dependencies, dependencies-of-dependencies, and presence of code derived from stack overflow/popular books/random places on the internet indexed by google.
normaler 5y ago
how does WTFPL compare to this?
- freemint 5y ago
  Badly. It is absolutely unclear how a judge would interpret it when the licensor later says he intended something else then what you interpret to be the spirit of the license as there is no "word of the license" that is legally parseable.
- bombcar 5y ago
  It’s missing a patent section and a disclaimer of warranty, but it’s also amusing.
- nsajko 5y ago
  Both are merely joke licenses.
  - suprfsat 5y ago
    What makes it a joke?
    - lifthrasiir 5y ago
      For WTFPL, if a parody counts as a joke, the author's own words: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/149050/should-i-change-the-name-of-the-wtfpl#comment617907_161949 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1490... (The author of the version 2, to be exact, but this version is also the widespread version of WTFPL anyway.)
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        A type of joke but definitely not "merely" a joke. Even that brief explanation says so in the second sentence.
- michaelt 5y ago
funstuff007 5y ago
Nathan Myhrvold is already building a business plan around this license's faults. i.e. reversibility of grant in perpetuity.
- HellsMaddy 5y ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - funstuff007 5y ago
    https://www.engadget.com/2012-05-30-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-defends-patent-trolling.html https://www.engadget.com/2012-05-30-intellectual-ventures-na...
tokai 5y ago
Why do people want public domain software licenses? Just use a proper licence and die at some point. End result is the same without the uncertainty.
- 683686285 5y ago
  The problem with most licenses is that they require that the license be distributed with the content that is licensed. I don't want to force people to do anything. I want it to be as if copyright doesn't exist.
  - Pet_Ant 5y ago
    By default copyright exists so by doing nothing you are copyrighting your work and preventing people who want to be in the legal clear from being able to use it (OSS games for example). The best you can do is watermark your art with CC0 and/or include the license or a link to it in the file metadata. But pretending we are living in a post-copyright utopia severely limits the reach of your work.
    - 683686285 5y ago
      I'm not pretending copyright doesn't exist, but I want other people to be able to interact with my work as if copyright and other forms of IP didn't exist. There doesn't seem to be a perfect way to achieve this. The problem with CC0 (and I believe the reason OSI doesn't approve of it) is that it says: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. Whereas many licenses can be interpreted as an implied patent license[0]. I guess adding an additional declaration saying something like this could fix that: > All trademark and patent rights associated with this work are permanently waived. But I have no idea if that would work and it's frustrating that there is no simple way of opting out of intellectual 'property' ownership all together. The closest, at least when it comes to software may be 0BSD considering large corporations like Google are willing to accept it. [0]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11653 https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11653
JasonFruit 5y ago
The name is so atrocious that I have misread it as Unilicense for all these years, only realizing how truly bad it was a decade later.
hannob 5y ago
I wish people would get together to agree upon a public domain alike software license that everyone finds acceptable. That'd mean: * OSI approves it * FSF approves it * Google and other companies with large stakes in FOSS find it acceptable * Github + Gitlab support it in their templates Can we have that?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- netr0ute 5y ago
  What about LGPL? It seems to tick all of the 4 boxes you have.
  - zokier 5y ago
    LGPL is not public domain alike
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      It's undesired by people who want to exploit other people's work commercially or fantasize that they somehow they might want to do so in the future. Kind of like poor people who don't want to tax the rich because they fantasize that they may someday be rich.
- floatboth 5y ago
  https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- knowledge-clay 5y ago
  0BSD? https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD
  - 5y ago
samatman 5y ago
A bit off topic, but commenting on footnotes is fair play: I don't believe that 'let' is in fact autoantonymic. A let is more-or-less lost, as a noun in English, but in the form inlet and outlet it remains ubiquitous. In "let or hindrance" we might observe that a right of travel (a let) might well be a hindrance to other uses of the property. A let in tennis is so-called because you 'let' the server try again. The sense is clearly one of permission to the player, not hindrance by the net.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Your objection interests me, because these are both cases that I figured out myself with much contemplation and was quite content with many years ago and have never subsequently looked up in any reference (and I doubt your alternatives ever occurred to me). But after a spot of investigation now, I don’t believe you’re right on either count and stick to what I have written, at least for now. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=let+tennis+hinder https://duckduckgo.com/?q=let+tennis+hinder: the consensus among the first few results, which are reputable-looking sources, seems to be that the hinder sense is probably correct, though some suggest as an alternative the French filet meaning net. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=etymology+of+let+and+hindrance https://duckduckgo.com/?q=etymology+of+let+and+hindrance: not much obviously canonical, but https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/without-let-or-hindrance.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/without-let-or-hindrance... at least sounds reasonable, and agrees with me, including a citation in the last paragraph from 1799 which is unequivocally being used in the sense I nominated.
  - waqf 5y ago
    We can do better than "at least sounds reasonable". Wiktionary is a detailed source for etymology (albeit not itself sourced): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let#Etymology_2 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let#Etymology_2
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      In my response I was addressing the specific phrase “let or hindrance”; that let has historically been auto-antonymic is incontrovertible and well-documented and (whether rightly or wrongly) I was interpreting samatman’s comment as referring to the two specific contexts where I say it is still exhibits its historical auto-antonymicity.
veltas 5y ago
It's annoying that there's no internationally recognised way of saying "No, I (and my inheritors) are not going to sue you for using this source."
- withinboredom 5y ago
  But you can’t speak for other people and your inheritors can do whatever they want.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    You can usually exclude things from being inherited.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      I’m not sure it works like that in every jurisdiction.
  - veltas 5y ago
    Not if it's put in a trust.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      That assumes that you can give the trust your copyright. This is not always possible.
- davidjytang 5y ago
  also "Don't sue me either".
captainmuon 5y ago
I'm not contributing to open source projects privately right now. But if I was publishing code on my own, I would probably make it actually unlicensed at first to keep my options open as much as possible. I would just put it somewhere and say: "here is code, you are technically able to look at it, but I am not giving you any permission". If somebody wants to use it and needs to follow copyright (for example in a commercial context) then I can grant them a free or paid license. I like the aspect that people who don't care about copyright have an advantage, and people who have internalized it cannot even use the code privately or look at it. I think it tells that I am not a big fan of the idea of intellectual property...
- Filligree 5y ago
  > I like the aspect that people who don't care about copyright have an advantage, and people who have internalized it cannot even use the code privately or look at it. I think it tells that I am not a big fan of the idea of intellectual property... I can’t stop you doing that. I’m not sure I even want to. I hate copyright, and while I’m not sure it should be completely destroyed, certainly it should be weakened by — say — ninety percent. However, that doesn’t mean I’m willing to break it. What I’ve internalised, having seen the alternative, isn’t copyright — it’s the rule of law. I’m not willing to break that just because it’s personally inconvenient.
- freemint 5y ago
  You are probably not very old but anyway . Let's say you die in accident. Nobody will be able to use your code until either copyright is repealed (the boomers half life has kicked in long enough such that they are irrelevant and we can change copyright) or you are 70 years dead. I understand you wanting to keep your options as long as possible. I see three options for you: - leave it without license and hope you will be able to license it as you want. Take no contributions. Have total freedom. Never accept contributors. - pick any non public domain equivalent license and require all contributions to allow you to relicense their contributions in the future. When you change the license in the future the all previous version released under that license stay that way. - pick a public domain equivalent license 0BSD preferably. All contributions under that license means you and their code and be relicensed by anybody including you. If you later decide to relicense you can do so without needing the contributors ok. Old versions stay in the public domain. Newer code (after relicensing doesn't).
sunflowerdeath 5y ago
I use it and will continue to use it because it most accurately reflects my intentions for my software. If some organization can't comply with it, it's worse for them. They should change, not me.
- samhw 5y ago
  > They should change, not me. OK, they should change. Great. They won't, though, so your code won't be usable by them. If that's not a problem, then your code was never really relevant to this discussion. If that is a problem, then shoulds and woulds ain't gonna help.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    The purpose of freely distributing code is not to be useful to corporations. It's to foster a spirit of sharing with the community. If I put something up for free, it's because I want other programmers to be able to freely use it. I don't care if a big corporation with expensive lawyers likes the way the license is worded.
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      But if your license is stupid, then other programmers can not use it. Congratulations. There is really no excuse for not at some point in your entire programming life, taking the time to go over these things, figure out what they end up meaning in real life, and thereafter knowing which ones actually do represent your wishes and intents. Picking one whos only property is it's so short it doesn't actually do anything hardly counts. It doesn't really matter how big and complicated a license is any more than how big and complicated a compiled executable is or all the parts in a car. What matters is does it do the job that needs doing. All else being equal, smaller and more elegant is better as a direction or principle of course, but the reason we even have writing is to assemble work into a reusable package, so that time-consuming work like writing a book only has to be done once, and then everyone else gets to use the big complicated work many times over without having to re-create it each time. It's an efficiency and a power amplifier to be able to pack up a bunch of complicated things into a writing and then treat the writing as a single simple thing. You happly use gcc (or your car, or whatever) many times every day. You did the work one time to figure out that the tool you need is gcc, and after that, all you mentally think about is just "gcc" not the thousands of lines of code or the millions of machine instructions that make it up every time you use it. If I write a new "The Un-cc" that only has about 8 lines of code and is oh so refreshingly simple to understand, one would hope that you would not use it. The point of the established and thorough licenses is exactly to do a whole lot of hard work once and let everyone else reuse it countless times. The point of a stupid new license that pointedly and intentionally does not do any of that hard work is there is no point at all to it. It's just a stupid idea, and as such, it's probably no great loss that other people can not use code from an author who chose such a stupid license.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Personally, I think the fact that we even have to talk about the suitability of Unlicense vs CC0 is evidence of how terribly stupid copyright law is. I wrote code, it isn't fancy or interesting and I make no money from it nor do I intend to, and I just want to let everyone know that I truly do not care at all what they do with it. Why is it so hard to let people know that they can use information in the natural way that information is used?
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  If you're in the US, you can release works into public domain by writing "This is public domain". In other countries, public domain doesn't exist and in order for someone to use a work, there needs to be legal proof that you have the right to use it. Hence the requirement for licenses. In a lot of ways, I prefer the latter approach because it puts the burden of proof on the copier, not the creator.
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    Nit: The public domain simply means a body of works that are outside of the copyright protection and thus exists for every country with the expiration of copyright, though it might not be named so. What those other countries actually lack is either the dedication to the public domain before the expiration or the inability to waive moral rights.
- recursive 5y ago
  I don't think this is a problem outside of corporate scenarios. If you just explain your position in plain human language, like you just did, then reasonable humans without a legal department will be able to comprehend it and act accordingly.
m0llusk 5y ago
The way people and organizations stand in the way of public domain releases is beyond rude to the point of genuine evil. My code is just code. It should be possible to let all others read it without obligation. There must be some way to restrain this relentless desire to cocoon everything in layers of legal entanglement. It is just code and I as the author desire others to be able to read it. This is not a crazy plot or rocket science. There might be technical problems with the name itself, but the license text explains the intent and refers to the https://unlicense.org/ https://unlicense.org/ site which has additional clarification. Proper use as recommended on the site has zero legal ambiguity. The idea that "BSD0" or "CC0" are better names makes no sense whatsoever. Public domain releases are made by those who do not want the baggage of a BSD or Creative Commons license. Maybe someone in these organizations should talk to someone familiar with marketing and namespaces to come up with a real solution? The CC0 suggestion is especially ironic since that has not approved. It doesn't actually exist as a legal standard which makes it unappealing. The OSI, FSF, FANG and other such companies, and the European Union need to get over the idea that they can and even must dictate all aspects of intellectual property ownership as they see fit. My code is not theirs and this is the core issue. My code is mine and thus mine to give away completely free without being encumbered by licensing schemes intended to yield control or profit. That their schemes for control and profit are so out of control that there is no agreed upon or even consistently imagined escape is a sign that they are operating beyond rational limits.
- gnud 5y ago
  > My code is not theirs and this is the core issue. This is _exactly_ why a lot of jurisdictions assign/assume copyright by default, and make it hard to 'remove'. Otherwise authors would see their work ripped off in a lot of inventive ways. When the default state is that every work is copyrighted, that removes a lot of possible confusion, and possible excuses.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Right. Under the older copyright regime in the US, you more or less had to add the appropriate incantation/symbols and send a copy to the Library of Congress or you pretty much had no leg to stand on collecting compensation if Disney or whoever decided to rip you off. The US decided that wasn't a good thing and that works should be copyrighted automatically. (Registration still has some benefits for collecting on copyright claims.) But that also means you now need to get rid of that automatic copyright, assuming you can, if you want to do so.
tomc1985 5y ago
I bet the people that came up with that name think they're just sooooooooooooo witty. Gag...
warmwaffles 5y ago
What is the issue with just declaring the license as MIT? I am not a lawyer and don't understand the drawbacks legally about it.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
Today I introduce the Un-cc! That old gcc is too big and complicated. In fact all the normal c compilers are too complicated. No one can read them and understand everything. There's thousands of lines of complicated code in there. Even in new reimplimentations like llvm. So I have a new cc that only has about 8 lines of code. It's refreshinly simple to understand. This makes it better. Enjoy!
kemitchell 5y ago
Blue Oak Council rates Unlicense as a permissive license, but in its bronze tier: https://blueoakcouncil.org/list#Unlicense https://blueoakcouncil.org/list#Unlicense It's an interesting phenomenon, socially. But legal-technically, it's far off the state of the art.
avhon1 5y ago
I've been frustrated that there exists no lawyer-verified, internationally-viable way to permanently waive all claims and rights to things (software or otherwise) I publish, and to assert that those rights will not be later reclaimed (whether by me, parties representing me, or heirs or successors who might claim to have inherited my rights). CC0's biggest issues for me are that, one, it explicitly does not waive rights to patentable ideas contained in the work: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. ...and two, that it only specifically says that I will not revoke the license or undertake "any other legal or equitable action to disrupt the quiet enjoyment of the Work by the public". I don't just want to enable "quiet enjoyment", I want to permit every legally permissible use of my work (anything I could grant a license for). "Vocal profiteering" is arguably not "quiet enjoyment", but I want to ensure that neither me, my representatives, nor my heirs or successors, could make that argument to revoke the license I grant. The Blue Oak license nicely disburses patent rights: > Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that would otherwise infringe any patent claims they can license or become able to license. ...but expressly retains copyright (preventing someone else from redistributing the work under different terms), and requires that the work always be distributed with a notice that the work is licensed https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 I wish to completely unburden anyone who finds my work desirable from the burden of attribution. This is why Public Domain is the end goal, and why licenses that do not expressly attempt to un-copyright my work are insufficient. MIT0 merely grants permission "to deal in the Software [to say nothing about non-software work, or aspects of a work] without restriction", and 0BSD is even weaker, granting only "permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee" [nevermind any activities that aren't expressly listed in the license, but which might be restricted by a country's system of copy-, artists', or moral rights, or any other restrictions I may impose besides fees].
- falcolas 5y ago
  > way to permanently waive all claims and rights to things (software or otherwise) I publish, and to assert that those rights will not be later reclaimed Probably because to do the second, you can't do the first - you have to retain enough rights to keep someone else from copying and relicensing it. And if you do the first, you can't do the second. The best way probably involves a third party, like a foundation or trustee, taking on the ownership under a contract that they will never switch ownership until it's naturally released by time. Of course, that costs money to maintain, otherwise it becomes an asset that gets sold off.
Anaminus 5y ago
If I can't clean the copyright grease off of my work, can I just waive the ability to enforce it? <LICENSE>+GOAWAY This license must never be enforced. I'm sure some verbose laywerspeak is required to make it ironclad, if it even works at all.
pygy_ 5y ago
Let's plug the Romantic WTF Public license, for the kicks https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License (I know it's a baaaad idea, I still love it)

123 points by chrismorgan 5y ago

I agree that the name is atrocious. I was running `npm init` recently on a new private project, I meant to write UNLICENSED which means "all rights reserved", but I accidentally missed the "d" at end and it got marked with "Unlicense" license.

contravariant 5y ago
Does anyone have the legal knowledge to say how bad it is when your license can't be distinguished from a simple typo?

chayleaf 5y ago

0BSD is nice as well. As a bonus, it's the only PD-equivalent license allowed in Google.

contravariant 5y ago
Arguably allowing your work to be used by anyone except Google is a feature not a bug.
- Bostonian 5y ago
  You publish open source code so that others can benefit from it, and if Google uses it maybe billions of people will benefit from it, so I disagree.
  - i80and 5y ago
    This is an individual choice; people have motivations beyond "maximize usage of my code".
  - maeln 5y ago
    Everyone has different reason to publish their code using open-source license. I like sharing my code but I don't like when multi-billion dollar company make a profit from it for example. Ofc, that's what I agreed to when I release my code under open-source license, but we are all free to have different sentiment about it.
- 683686285 5y ago
  I assume Google's legal department is not irrational and that they are worrying about something that could happen to anyone.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Hum... Rational (from the point of view of the entire enterprise) bureaucracy bodies probably exist, but they are not common. But that second part "something that could happen to anyone" is completely unfounded. It may be because of something that could happen to you, or it may not. There is no reason to assume either way. As people keep ignoring on the context of software architecture, you are not Google.
freemint 5y ago
A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g
chrismorgan 5y ago
Good call. I had somehow quite forgotten about it, though I know I read all the N-clause BSD variants a decade or so ago. I’ve added a section at the end with that as an alternative recommendation.
Jach 5y ago
Google uses Sqlite, which is simply public domain. Did someone at Google actually purchase one of their pseudo-license 'warranty of title' documents they offer for companies (supposedly mostly in other countries that officially don't recognize PD grants) with more legal budget than sense? Google also uses SBCL, which is mostly public domain "in jurisdictions where this is possible, or under the FreeBSD licence where not." Does the entry for it in the list of third party software say Google is using it under the FreeBSD license or PD? (They also employ at least one developer who is a core maintainer on the side.) The legal department's default answer is "no" to anything they haven't already said "yes" to, so it wouldn't surprise me if your default options are limited. But presumably with useful enough software under other PD-equivalent things they could be forced to say "yes". As an aside I'd be very interested to know the extent of internal audits Google does on its code for legal risks in un-cleared-by-legal dependencies, dependencies-of-dependencies, and presence of code derived from stack overflow/popular books/random places on the internet indexed by google.

normaler 5y ago

how does WTFPL compare to this?

freemint 5y ago
Badly. It is absolutely unclear how a judge would interpret it when the licensor later says he intended something else then what you interpret to be the spirit of the license as there is no "word of the license" that is legally parseable.
bombcar 5y ago
It’s missing a patent section and a disclaimer of warranty, but it’s also amusing.
nsajko 5y ago
Both are merely joke licenses.
- suprfsat 5y ago
  What makes it a joke?
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    For WTFPL, if a parody counts as a joke, the author's own words: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/149050/should-i-change-the-name-of-the-wtfpl#comment617907_161949 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1490... (The author of the version 2, to be exact, but this version is also the widespread version of WTFPL anyway.)
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      A type of joke but definitely not "merely" a joke. Even that brief explanation says so in the second sentence.
michaelt 5y ago

funstuff007 5y ago

Nathan Myhrvold is already building a business plan around this license's faults. i.e. reversibility of grant in perpetuity.

HellsMaddy 5y ago
Care to elaborate?
- funstuff007 5y ago
  https://www.engadget.com/2012-05-30-intellectual-ventures-nathan-myhrvold-defends-patent-trolling.html https://www.engadget.com/2012-05-30-intellectual-ventures-na...

tokai 5y ago

Why do people want public domain software licenses? Just use a proper licence and die at some point. End result is the same without the uncertainty.

683686285 5y ago
The problem with most licenses is that they require that the license be distributed with the content that is licensed. I don't want to force people to do anything. I want it to be as if copyright doesn't exist.
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
  By default copyright exists so by doing nothing you are copyrighting your work and preventing people who want to be in the legal clear from being able to use it (OSS games for example). The best you can do is watermark your art with CC0 and/or include the license or a link to it in the file metadata. But pretending we are living in a post-copyright utopia severely limits the reach of your work.
  - 683686285 5y ago
    I'm not pretending copyright doesn't exist, but I want other people to be able to interact with my work as if copyright and other forms of IP didn't exist. There doesn't seem to be a perfect way to achieve this. The problem with CC0 (and I believe the reason OSI doesn't approve of it) is that it says: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. Whereas many licenses can be interpreted as an implied patent license[0]. I guess adding an additional declaration saying something like this could fix that: > All trademark and patent rights associated with this work are permanently waived. But I have no idea if that would work and it's frustrating that there is no simple way of opting out of intellectual 'property' ownership all together. The closest, at least when it comes to software may be 0BSD considering large corporations like Google are willing to accept it. [0]: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11653 https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11653

JasonFruit 5y ago

The name is so atrocious that I have misread it as Unilicense for all these years, only realizing how truly bad it was a decade later.

hannob 5y ago

I wish people would get together to agree upon a public domain alike software license that everyone finds acceptable. That'd mean: * OSI approves it * FSF approves it * Google and other companies with large stakes in FOSS find it acceptable * Github + Gitlab support it in their templates Can we have that?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
netr0ute 5y ago
What about LGPL? It seems to tick all of the 4 boxes you have.
- zokier 5y ago
  LGPL is not public domain alike
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    It's undesired by people who want to exploit other people's work commercially or fantasize that they somehow they might want to do so in the future. Kind of like poor people who don't want to tax the rich because they fantasize that they may someday be rich.
floatboth 5y ago
https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
knowledge-clay 5y ago
0BSD? https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD
- 5y ago

samatman 5y ago

A bit off topic, but commenting on footnotes is fair play: I don't believe that 'let' is in fact autoantonymic. A let is more-or-less lost, as a noun in English, but in the form inlet and outlet it remains ubiquitous. In "let or hindrance" we might observe that a right of travel (a let) might well be a hindrance to other uses of the property. A let in tennis is so-called because you 'let' the server try again. The sense is clearly one of permission to the player, not hindrance by the net.

chrismorgan 5y ago
Your objection interests me, because these are both cases that I figured out myself with much contemplation and was quite content with many years ago and have never subsequently looked up in any reference (and I doubt your alternatives ever occurred to me). But after a spot of investigation now, I don’t believe you’re right on either count and stick to what I have written, at least for now. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=let+tennis+hinder https://duckduckgo.com/?q=let+tennis+hinder: the consensus among the first few results, which are reputable-looking sources, seems to be that the hinder sense is probably correct, though some suggest as an alternative the French filet meaning net. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=etymology+of+let+and+hindrance https://duckduckgo.com/?q=etymology+of+let+and+hindrance: not much obviously canonical, but https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/without-let-or-hindrance.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/without-let-or-hindrance... at least sounds reasonable, and agrees with me, including a citation in the last paragraph from 1799 which is unequivocally being used in the sense I nominated.
- waqf 5y ago
  We can do better than "at least sounds reasonable". Wiktionary is a detailed source for etymology (albeit not itself sourced): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let#Etymology_2 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let#Etymology_2
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    In my response I was addressing the specific phrase “let or hindrance”; that let has historically been auto-antonymic is incontrovertible and well-documented and (whether rightly or wrongly) I was interpreting samatman’s comment as referring to the two specific contexts where I say it is still exhibits its historical auto-antonymicity.

veltas 5y ago

It's annoying that there's no internationally recognised way of saying "No, I (and my inheritors) are not going to sue you for using this source."

withinboredom 5y ago
But you can’t speak for other people and your inheritors can do whatever they want.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  You can usually exclude things from being inherited.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    I’m not sure it works like that in every jurisdiction.
- veltas 5y ago
  Not if it's put in a trust.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    That assumes that you can give the trust your copyright. This is not always possible.
davidjytang 5y ago
also "Don't sue me either".

captainmuon 5y ago

I'm not contributing to open source projects privately right now. But if I was publishing code on my own, I would probably make it actually unlicensed at first to keep my options open as much as possible. I would just put it somewhere and say: "here is code, you are technically able to look at it, but I am not giving you any permission". If somebody wants to use it and needs to follow copyright (for example in a commercial context) then I can grant them a free or paid license. I like the aspect that people who don't care about copyright have an advantage, and people who have internalized it cannot even use the code privately or look at it. I think it tells that I am not a big fan of the idea of intellectual property...

Filligree 5y ago
> I like the aspect that people who don't care about copyright have an advantage, and people who have internalized it cannot even use the code privately or look at it. I think it tells that I am not a big fan of the idea of intellectual property... I can’t stop you doing that. I’m not sure I even want to. I hate copyright, and while I’m not sure it should be completely destroyed, certainly it should be weakened by — say — ninety percent. However, that doesn’t mean I’m willing to break it. What I’ve internalised, having seen the alternative, isn’t copyright — it’s the rule of law. I’m not willing to break that just because it’s personally inconvenient.
freemint 5y ago
You are probably not very old but anyway . Let's say you die in accident. Nobody will be able to use your code until either copyright is repealed (the boomers half life has kicked in long enough such that they are irrelevant and we can change copyright) or you are 70 years dead. I understand you wanting to keep your options as long as possible. I see three options for you: - leave it without license and hope you will be able to license it as you want. Take no contributions. Have total freedom. Never accept contributors. - pick any non public domain equivalent license and require all contributions to allow you to relicense their contributions in the future. When you change the license in the future the all previous version released under that license stay that way. - pick a public domain equivalent license 0BSD preferably. All contributions under that license means you and their code and be relicensed by anybody including you. If you later decide to relicense you can do so without needing the contributors ok. Old versions stay in the public domain. Newer code (after relicensing doesn't).

sunflowerdeath 5y ago

I use it and will continue to use it because it most accurately reflects my intentions for my software. If some organization can't comply with it, it's worse for them. They should change, not me.

samhw 5y ago
> They should change, not me. OK, they should change. Great. They won't, though, so your code won't be usable by them. If that's not a problem, then your code was never really relevant to this discussion. If that is a problem, then shoulds and woulds ain't gonna help.
- hsn915 5y ago
  The purpose of freely distributing code is not to be useful to corporations. It's to foster a spirit of sharing with the community. If I put something up for free, it's because I want other programmers to be able to freely use it. I don't care if a big corporation with expensive lawyers likes the way the license is worded.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    But if your license is stupid, then other programmers can not use it. Congratulations. There is really no excuse for not at some point in your entire programming life, taking the time to go over these things, figure out what they end up meaning in real life, and thereafter knowing which ones actually do represent your wishes and intents. Picking one whos only property is it's so short it doesn't actually do anything hardly counts. It doesn't really matter how big and complicated a license is any more than how big and complicated a compiled executable is or all the parts in a car. What matters is does it do the job that needs doing. All else being equal, smaller and more elegant is better as a direction or principle of course, but the reason we even have writing is to assemble work into a reusable package, so that time-consuming work like writing a book only has to be done once, and then everyone else gets to use the big complicated work many times over without having to re-create it each time. It's an efficiency and a power amplifier to be able to pack up a bunch of complicated things into a writing and then treat the writing as a single simple thing. You happly use gcc (or your car, or whatever) many times every day. You did the work one time to figure out that the tool you need is gcc, and after that, all you mentally think about is just "gcc" not the thousands of lines of code or the millions of machine instructions that make it up every time you use it. If I write a new "The Un-cc" that only has about 8 lines of code and is oh so refreshingly simple to understand, one would hope that you would not use it. The point of the established and thorough licenses is exactly to do a whole lot of hard work once and let everyone else reuse it countless times. The point of a stupid new license that pointedly and intentionally does not do any of that hard work is there is no point at all to it. It's just a stupid idea, and as such, it's probably no great loss that other people can not use code from an author who chose such a stupid license.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Personally, I think the fact that we even have to talk about the suitability of Unlicense vs CC0 is evidence of how terribly stupid copyright law is. I wrote code, it isn't fancy or interesting and I make no money from it nor do I intend to, and I just want to let everyone know that I truly do not care at all what they do with it. Why is it so hard to let people know that they can use information in the natural way that information is used?

kayodelycaon 5y ago
If you're in the US, you can release works into public domain by writing "This is public domain". In other countries, public domain doesn't exist and in order for someone to use a work, there needs to be legal proof that you have the right to use it. Hence the requirement for licenses. In a lot of ways, I prefer the latter approach because it puts the burden of proof on the copier, not the creator.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Nit: The public domain simply means a body of works that are outside of the copyright protection and thus exists for every country with the expiration of copyright, though it might not be named so. What those other countries actually lack is either the dedication to the public domain before the expiration or the inability to waive moral rights.
recursive 5y ago
I don't think this is a problem outside of corporate scenarios. If you just explain your position in plain human language, like you just did, then reasonable humans without a legal department will be able to comprehend it and act accordingly.

m0llusk 5y ago

The way people and organizations stand in the way of public domain releases is beyond rude to the point of genuine evil. My code is just code. It should be possible to let all others read it without obligation. There must be some way to restrain this relentless desire to cocoon everything in layers of legal entanglement. It is just code and I as the author desire others to be able to read it. This is not a crazy plot or rocket science. There might be technical problems with the name itself, but the license text explains the intent and refers to the https://unlicense.org/ https://unlicense.org/ site which has additional clarification. Proper use as recommended on the site has zero legal ambiguity. The idea that "BSD0" or "CC0" are better names makes no sense whatsoever. Public domain releases are made by those who do not want the baggage of a BSD or Creative Commons license. Maybe someone in these organizations should talk to someone familiar with marketing and namespaces to come up with a real solution? The CC0 suggestion is especially ironic since that has not approved. It doesn't actually exist as a legal standard which makes it unappealing. The OSI, FSF, FANG and other such companies, and the European Union need to get over the idea that they can and even must dictate all aspects of intellectual property ownership as they see fit. My code is not theirs and this is the core issue. My code is mine and thus mine to give away completely free without being encumbered by licensing schemes intended to yield control or profit. That their schemes for control and profit are so out of control that there is no agreed upon or even consistently imagined escape is a sign that they are operating beyond rational limits.

gnud 5y ago
> My code is not theirs and this is the core issue. This is _exactly_ why a lot of jurisdictions assign/assume copyright by default, and make it hard to 'remove'. Otherwise authors would see their work ripped off in a lot of inventive ways. When the default state is that every work is copyrighted, that removes a lot of possible confusion, and possible excuses.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Right. Under the older copyright regime in the US, you more or less had to add the appropriate incantation/symbols and send a copy to the Library of Congress or you pretty much had no leg to stand on collecting compensation if Disney or whoever decided to rip you off. The US decided that wasn't a good thing and that works should be copyrighted automatically. (Registration still has some benefits for collecting on copyright claims.) But that also means you now need to get rid of that automatic copyright, assuming you can, if you want to do so.

tomc1985 5y ago

I bet the people that came up with that name think they're just sooooooooooooo witty. Gag...

warmwaffles 5y ago

What is the issue with just declaring the license as MIT? I am not a lawyer and don't understand the drawbacks legally about it.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

Today I introduce the Un-cc! That old gcc is too big and complicated. In fact all the normal c compilers are too complicated. No one can read them and understand everything. There's thousands of lines of complicated code in there. Even in new reimplimentations like llvm. So I have a new cc that only has about 8 lines of code. It's refreshinly simple to understand. This makes it better. Enjoy!

kemitchell 5y ago

Blue Oak Council rates Unlicense as a permissive license, but in its bronze tier: https://blueoakcouncil.org/list#Unlicense https://blueoakcouncil.org/list#Unlicense It's an interesting phenomenon, socially. But legal-technically, it's far off the state of the art.

avhon1 5y ago

I've been frustrated that there exists no lawyer-verified, internationally-viable way to permanently waive all claims and rights to things (software or otherwise) I publish, and to assert that those rights will not be later reclaimed (whether by me, parties representing me, or heirs or successors who might claim to have inherited my rights). CC0's biggest issues for me are that, one, it explicitly does not waive rights to patentable ideas contained in the work: > No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document. ...and two, that it only specifically says that I will not revoke the license or undertake "any other legal or equitable action to disrupt the quiet enjoyment of the Work by the public". I don't just want to enable "quiet enjoyment", I want to permit every legally permissible use of my work (anything I could grant a license for). "Vocal profiteering" is arguably not "quiet enjoyment", but I want to ensure that neither me, my representatives, nor my heirs or successors, could make that argument to revoke the license I grant. The Blue Oak license nicely disburses patent rights: > Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that would otherwise infringe any patent claims they can license or become able to license. ...but expressly retains copyright (preventing someone else from redistributing the work under different terms), and requires that the work always be distributed with a notice that the work is licensed https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 I wish to completely unburden anyone who finds my work desirable from the burden of attribution. This is why Public Domain is the end goal, and why licenses that do not expressly attempt to un-copyright my work are insufficient. MIT0 merely grants permission "to deal in the Software [to say nothing about non-software work, or aspects of a work] without restriction", and 0BSD is even weaker, granting only "permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee" [nevermind any activities that aren't expressly listed in the license, but which might be restricted by a country's system of copy-, artists', or moral rights, or any other restrictions I may impose besides fees].

falcolas 5y ago
> way to permanently waive all claims and rights to things (software or otherwise) I publish, and to assert that those rights will not be later reclaimed Probably because to do the second, you can't do the first - you have to retain enough rights to keep someone else from copying and relicensing it. And if you do the first, you can't do the second. The best way probably involves a third party, like a foundation or trustee, taking on the ownership under a contract that they will never switch ownership until it's naturally released by time. Of course, that costs money to maintain, otherwise it becomes an asset that gets sold off.

Anaminus 5y ago

If I can't clean the copyright grease off of my work, can I just waive the ability to enforce it? <LICENSE>+GOAWAY This license must never be enforced. I'm sure some verbose laywerspeak is required to make it ironclad, if it even works at all.

pygy_ 5y ago

Let's plug the Romantic WTF Public license, for the kicks https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License (I know it's a baaaad idea, I still love it)