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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 ap
by 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 agoWhat about LGPL? It seems to tick all of the 4 boxes you have.
- zokier 5y agoLGPL is not public domain alike
- michaelmrose 5y agoIt'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 agohttps://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- knowledge-clay 5y ago0BSD? https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD
- ahelwer 5y agoNot an alike license.
- freemint 5y agoWhat do you mean? CC0 and 0BSD are both public domain equivalent.
- ghaff 5y agoCC0 isn't an OSI-approved license. (It was withdrawn from consideration around patent language concerns.) MIT-0 (or probably 0BSD now as well) is probably the closest you get to a public domain license to the degree that putting something in the public domain is recognized in a given jurisdiction.
- marcinzm 5y ago...isn't that literally the opposite of public domain? You can't have it both be public domain with no copyright and ALSO use copyright to enforce what people do with their copies of it.
- hannob 5y agoFails on criterion 4, and I think that's a real issue. Github is the de-facto default sourcecode plattform. If it isn't a standard option on Github then it doesn't feel like a standard license.
- rdpintqogeogsaa 5y ago0BSD is actually incompatible with a desired pure CC0. Unlike CC0, 0BSD keeps copyright intact. It's just a license with no conditions except the usual disclaimer; CC0 attempts to cause a public domain dedication wherever possible. Consider the following: 1. Let there be a file F. F is released to the public under 0BSD. 2. Let there be a project P. P includes code from F. The license notice of F is scrubbed as part of the inclusion process. 3. P is released as CC0. The author of P cannot release the project as CC0 because the author has no right dedicate another person's code (F) to the public domain. Because 0BSD doesn't cause a public domain dedication in jurisdictions that accept doing so, F would have to continue being separate and explicitly exempt from the effects of CC0 to be an accurate of its usage terms. Effectively, this makes 0BSD be a de-facto attribution license in a CC0 project. In practice, it makes no difference, but it's legally deeply inelegant.
- _ZeD_ 5y agoisn't it cc0?
- hannob 5y agoNot OSI approved.
- hsn915 5y agoThe problem with CC0 is it's very wordy and very legaleeze, which means I don't want to bother trying to understand it, and potential users won't either. A one-line sentence should be more than enough to clarify my intent.
- zarzavat 5y agoPublic domain. Concise. Effective. Choose any two. The issue is that donating to the “public domain” isn’t a thing in many jurisdictions, so if you want a license that is effective everywhere then it needs to be wordy. If you are happy to retain copyright and other rights and simply want to grant other people a license to use you work then just use MIT.
- mokus 5y agoI hear this a lot, but what jurisdictions and why? On the face of it, it seems batshit insane to me that there would be a place where I can’t waive my property rights on something.
- agency 5y agoGermany, for one: (PDF warning) https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kreuzer.pdf https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kre... > With regard to the transferability and the waiving of the copyright the German copyright law can be considered as one of the strictest systems in the world. Main reason is the strict monistic approach the German copyright law bases on. Key feature of this approach is the concept that, in principle, the copyright/author’s right itself can neither be transferred to another person nor waived by the author herself. The German author’s right consists of two parts, the moral rights and the exploitation rights. The moral rights are – as a rule – personal rights that are bound to the person of the creator (or, after her death, her legal heirs), i.e. they can neither be transferred nor waived. Since moral and exploitation rights are considered as inseparable parts of the author’s right as a whole (monistic approach) the exploitation rights cannot – in principle – transferred or waived by contract as well. However it is naturally possible to license the use of the work i.e. to transfer rights to use a protected work even on a large scale. Such licenses can practically lead (nearly) to the same result as an assignment or waiver of rights.
- ahelwer 5y agoGoogle et. al (and OSI for that matter) will find no such alike-license acceptable until a platform using that license becomes too valuable to ignore, like Linux with GPLv2. So the calculus has to tilt such that giving their work away for free is worth it because they get so, so much work for free. And even then they will try to work around it like with Fuschia. Plus since everything is served over the internet these days unless a license includes AGPL-type clauses the alike requirement will not attach.
- faho 5y agoThe parent was asking for a license "akin to Public Domain", not a "share-alike" license.
- jhardy54 5y agoThat’s the 0BSD. I called it the Free Public License when submitting to OSI, but we changed it to 0BSD because Landley had apparently come up with the same license a few years before me.
- freemint 5y agoCan you post the FPL text? I am wondering whether it was literally the same license.
- jhardy54 5y agoIt’s the same text, which is just the ISC license sans the “ provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies” clause. The only differences: - I didn’t use the “Copyright Boaty McBoatface 2022” line, but that’s not a big enough change to justify having two licenses. - The license was approved as the FPL-1.0.0, which I believe was the first OSI-approved license that user semantic versioning. This isn’t necessary, but I was mildly excited about it. - The 0BSD doesn’t actually inherit from any other BSD license, the “BSD” bit is more of a spiritual nod that I found more confusing than helpful.
- freemint 5y ago> The 0BSD doesn’t actually inherit from any other BSD license, the “BSD” bit is more of a spiritual nod that I found more confusing than helpful. Don't tell Rob Landley that (the creator of the license). He is quite adamant that he used a BSD license as the basis.
- dmulholl 5y agoThanks for this. 0BSD has been my default license since I discovered it. My only issue with the MIT license was the requirement for attribution, which always seemed like an unnecessary pain. 0BSD fixes that.
- thomascgalvin 5y agoIs `This work is public domain.` insufficient?
- ketzu 5y agoYes, because in some jurisdictions it is not possible to discard your rights.
- zinekeller 5y agoNo, no, no, no. Nope. That's enough in US but never enough (like, legally impossible) in Europe or parts of Asia (that's why CC0 has a fallback permissive license).
- ravenstine 5y agoI'm curious... if Creative Commons can't even create a public domain license that applies to both US and Europe, then what would it actually take to do so? Seems insane that any system can't accept "this is public domain" as all you need.
- Taywee 5y agoSome places, like Germany, don't recognize a public domain at all.
- hutzlibu 5y agoIn a way we do, called Gemeinfrei. But the only way to transfer something to it, is dying and waiting 70 years.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoWhat is the status of work that no one knows where it came from? A recipe for a cake is written on a paper and left on a bulletin board in town. It has no name and no one witnessed it being posted. Everyone sees it and now knows how to make this cake. The author may or may not be dead for 70 years. Is it illegal to even document this cake recipe? You couldn't legally recount it in a news article or history text book without being able say who the author was and prove that they either granted a copy right or are known to be dead for 70 years? Or worse, you are not only incentivised but essentially obligated to claim the authorship yourself just so you have someone to assign it to? The thing undeniably exists regardless that the legal structure provides no place for it. It's patently ridiculous. (guilty, terrible pun intended).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- donatj 5y agoMIT-0 is pretty close as well. https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0 https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0
- smasher164 5y agoIt lacks OSI approval, though -- which is a big one. I suppose someone could jump on the OSI mailing lists to get it through the approval process, but it hasn't been done yet.
- ghaff 5y agoIt is. https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0 https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0 (Relatively recently.)
- smasher164 5y agoI stand corrected.
- indymike 5y ago> Google and other companies with large stakes in FOSS find it acceptable There are really a lot of times that this is not important, or may be detrimental to your projects success.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kemitchell 5y agoBlue Oak Council, a gaggle of savvy open licensing lawyers, published a model permissive software license: https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 There's a brief write-up here: https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model All of us have direct experience with both OSI and FSF license processes. We have no desire to deal with them again. Even for a thoroughly noncontroversial permissive license. I'm executive director of Blue Oak Council.
- mattarm 5y ago> All of us have direct experience with both OSI and FSF license processes. We have no desire to deal with them again. As a more casual person looking to use a license, this is basically the opposite of what I want to read. As a non-lawyer, I have little chance of vetting a license myself. As a person with life experience, I have full appreciation for the delicacy of these kinds of licenses and legal issues. If a license has consensus from OSI, FSF, Debian, maybe a FANG company or two, etc., then I have some trust that a kind of validation and peer review has occurred. I fear that using a license for which this has not occurred puts the users of my software at risk, or at least shifts the burden of future validation on to them. TLDR: everybody knows what MIT, BSD, Apache, and the various GPL licenses imply. I think other bespoke licenses have a pretty high bar to clear before they become truly useful.
- kemitchell 5y agoI've written a bit on my experiences with OSI review in particular, and also the list of licenses it has approved. See, e.g., https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/05/05/Rely-on-OSI.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/05/05/Rely-on-OSI.html. In a nutshell: people think there's a team of lawyers back there, counting angels on the heads of fine legal pins. But it's actually a highly politicized mailman list where activist-types do most of the talking. I put energy into cofounding Blue Oak Council to publish rigorous resources, like our permissive license list, https://blueoakcouncil.org/list https://blueoakcouncil.org/list, in large part out of disappointment and dread, pulling back the curtain on the institutional processes for license review. As lawyers, we need functional resources like that license list, to incorporate by reference into contracts and policies. Fundamentally political artifacts, like OSI or FSF or Debian whitelists, are type errors in those contexts. > everybody knows what MIT, BSD, Apache, and the various GPL licenses imply I'm afraid that's not true. I would say there is broad agreement on many of the core aspects. And in many situations, practically, the specific license terms don't matter nearly as much as widely help expectations. But key concepts affecting fairly common situations remain unclear, and those details come out when there's money or strategic leverage on the line. See, e.g. the list Heather Meeker keeps at https://heathermeeker.com/open-source-faq/what-are-the-most-difficult-questions-in-open-source-licensing/ https://heathermeeker.com/open-source-faq/what-are-the-most-... See also the whole debate on permissive licenses and standards-essential patents: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/10/03/Open-Standards.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/10/03/Open-Standards.htm....
- pjfin123 5y agoNot ideal but I've used dual licensing under MIT and CCO.