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There's a lot of second and third and fourth-hand reports of people who are not lawyers trying to discuss this. Your blog post, for example, cites as a source S

There's a lot of second and third and fourth-hand reports of people who are not lawyers trying to discuss this. Your blog post, for example, cites as a source StackOverflow user "stawberryfields" who claims to have be reiterating something that they read in another StackOverflow answer. I'm not a lawyer, but I also can't afford to hire one. So I'd like to stick to things that actual lawyers have said. For reference, the OSI's comments when approving The Unlicense: > There is general agreement that the document is poorly drafted. It is > an attempt to dedicate a work to the public domain (which, taken > alone, would not be approved as an open source license) but it also > has wording commonly used for license grants.There was some discussion > about the legal effectiveness of the document, in particular how it > would operate in a jurisdiction where one cannot dedicate a work to > the public domain. The lawyers who opined on the issue, both US and > non-US, agreed that the document would most likely be interpreted as a > license and that the license met the OSD. It is therefore recommended > for approval. => https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2020-June/004890.html https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.... You seem to interpret "the document would most likely be interpreted as a license" as standing alone, which forms the basis of your critique. I interpret that line in the context of the sentence before. That is to say, I think "the issue" is how the license would be treated in a jurisdiction without a public domain, and I think that the lawyers agree the that it would be treated as a license only in that context. To quickly address some other points: Many people comment that "public domain dedication" is an ill-defined legal term and you shouldn't even try. Okay, fine, whatever. I'll happily use a public-domain-equivalent license. Citing the above, The Unlicense works for this purpose. Your comments on its name are understandable, but as someone who is trying to actually license my code in a public-domain-equivalent way, I can't afford to be picky about that. I don't trust/understand The FSF's "recommendation" for CC0 because in their guidance on CC0, they explicitly do not recommend using CC0 for software. (Not even to mention the thread we're commenting on.) Many people on the OSI mailing list harshly criticized The Unlicense for being written by someone that isn't a lawyer. While I understand their concerns, again, I'm not aware of any licenses written by lawyers to be public-domain equivalent. The BSD 0-clause is just deleting portions of the BSD license. Since neither of these were written by lawyers, I feel like I can speculate by saying that The Unlicense seems to me to cover a lot more cases and is a lot more explicit about its intent than 0BSD. All that is to say, I know that a lot of people don't like The Unlicense. I would love to use a public-domain-equivalent license written by a lawyer with a patent disclaimer. But doesn't exist, and the closest thing in intent is The Unlicense.

chrismorgan 4y ago
I have erred in my understanding of the key sentence you’re quoting. Thank you for pointing that out; I will amend my writings about it. But I didn’t actually build anything on that point; correcting it requires only changing a few words in two places, a minor patch. All of my arguments and other criticisms are still intact. As for Unlicense versus CC0 or 0BSD, and the patent law matters in question here: the Unlicense explicitly says it’s talking about copyright law, and limits the effects of its fallback license to that. And as a public domain dedication, it can’t exceed that scope. Thus, worldwide it will exclude any patent law considerations just as thoroughly and reliably as CC0 which explicitly reminds you of this fact. This is a decent chunk of the problems with both Unlicense and CC0: public domain dedications only cover copyright law, and consensus has been building that that’s not enough for open source. If you want a public domain dedication: use CC0, because it’s fairly clearly uniformly better than Unlicense. If you want a public-domain-equivalent license: use 0BSD or MIT-0, but certainly not Unlicense, because it’s a PDD with fallback license, not a PDEL, which means that it cannot possibly have any implicit patent or trademark grant; you could staple a patent grant on top of it (or better yet, in my opinion, just state clearly that there are no applicable patent rights). The problem with Unlicense is that by bad drafting it exists partway between PDD and PDEL, and doesn’t do the best job of either. So choose which you want, and take the better option. It would be nice to have a public-domain-equivalent form license that included a patent grant or release. But Unlicense is not close to that in intent. It seems to me very clear that the only fully consistent position for Fedora here would be to disallow all forms of public domain dedication (most germanely Unlicense), unless accompanied by some supplemental remark on patent law.
- MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
  Thanks for your reply. I will definitely consider using a more explicit public-domain equivalence in the future.

chrismorgan 4y ago

I have erred in my understanding of the key sentence you’re quoting. Thank you for pointing that out; I will amend my writings about it. But I didn’t actually build anything on that point; correcting it requires only changing a few words in two places, a minor patch. All of my arguments and other criticisms are still intact. As for Unlicense versus CC0 or 0BSD, and the patent law matters in question here: the Unlicense explicitly says it’s talking about copyright law, and limits the effects of its fallback license to that. And as a public domain dedication, it can’t exceed that scope. Thus, worldwide it will exclude any patent law considerations just as thoroughly and reliably as CC0 which explicitly reminds you of this fact. This is a decent chunk of the problems with both Unlicense and CC0: public domain dedications only cover copyright law, and consensus has been building that that’s not enough for open source. If you want a public domain dedication: use CC0, because it’s fairly clearly uniformly better than Unlicense. If you want a public-domain-equivalent license: use 0BSD or MIT-0, but certainly not Unlicense, because it’s a PDD with fallback license, not a PDEL, which means that it cannot possibly have any implicit patent or trademark grant; you could staple a patent grant on top of it (or better yet, in my opinion, just state clearly that there are no applicable patent rights). The problem with Unlicense is that by bad drafting it exists partway between PDD and PDEL, and doesn’t do the best job of either. So choose which you want, and take the better option. It would be nice to have a public-domain-equivalent form license that included a patent grant or release. But Unlicense is not close to that in intent. It seems to me very clear that the only fully consistent position for Fedora here would be to disallow all forms of public domain dedication (most germanely Unlicense), unless accompanied by some supplemental remark on patent law.

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
Thanks for your reply. I will definitely consider using a more explicit public-domain equivalence in the future.