4 ms·

Very cool. I'm not seeing a license file, or any mention of licensing. You might want to toss that in there, if you want to allow / encourage people to use it

Very cool. I'm not seeing a license file, or any mention of licensing. You might want to toss that in there, if you want to allow / encourage people to use it.

jasonkester 15y ago
I've never understood this complaint. If the author didn't want people to use his thing, he wouldn't have put it out on the internet and encouraged people to use it. Why do you feel the need to add rules and restrictions to something so trivial as sharing a few lines of code with anybody who wants to use them? Open source licenses only ever really serve to restrict what you can do with the thing. If you truly don't care what people do with the code you release, just release it. Like this guy did.
- eCa 15y ago
  Actually, they don't. Any work you do is automatically restricted in its use. What open source licenses strive to do (to varying degrees, depending on license) is basically: * Reduce the risk for the person publishing the thing * Grant rights to the user of the thing * Restrict (or not) the ways in which the thing can be distributed to others About the closest to public domain you can get is probably something like this: http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0
- chc 15y ago
  Legally speaking, that's backwards AFAIK. If you don't give people a license, they are not allowed to do anything with your code — full copyright protection is something you have to opt out of, not into. You might say that putting it on the Internet and encouraging people to use it is an implicit license, but you're on thin ice at best if you're depending on that unwritten license. I doubt most legal departments would even consider the suggestion. Even if you really, really trust the author, someone could acquire the rights to the code later on and sue your pants off if you don't actually have a valid license. Would you be able to successfully argue "But this other guy posted it on the Internet, so obviously I'm allowed to use it as I see fit"? IANAL, but I really doubt it.
- jerfelix 15y ago
  Many corporate environments are not allowed, period, to use software against the terms of of the license. In absence of a license, the author retains all rights.

Very cool. I'm not seeing a license file, or any mention of licensing. You might want to toss that in there, if you want to allow / encourage people to use it.

jasonkester 15y ago

I've never understood this complaint. If the author didn't want people to use his thing, he wouldn't have put it out on the internet and encouraged people to use it. Why do you feel the need to add rules and restrictions to something so trivial as sharing a few lines of code with anybody who wants to use them? Open source licenses only ever really serve to restrict what you can do with the thing. If you truly don't care what people do with the code you release, just release it. Like this guy did.

eCa 15y ago
Actually, they don't. Any work you do is automatically restricted in its use. What open source licenses strive to do (to varying degrees, depending on license) is basically: * Reduce the risk for the person publishing the thing * Grant rights to the user of the thing * Restrict (or not) the ways in which the thing can be distributed to others About the closest to public domain you can get is probably something like this: http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0
chc 15y ago
Legally speaking, that's backwards AFAIK. If you don't give people a license, they are not allowed to do anything with your code — full copyright protection is something you have to opt out of, not into. You might say that putting it on the Internet and encouraging people to use it is an implicit license, but you're on thin ice at best if you're depending on that unwritten license. I doubt most legal departments would even consider the suggestion. Even if you really, really trust the author, someone could acquire the rights to the code later on and sue your pants off if you don't actually have a valid license. Would you be able to successfully argue "But this other guy posted it on the Internet, so obviously I'm allowed to use it as I see fit"? IANAL, but I really doubt it.
jerfelix 15y ago
Many corporate environments are not allowed, period, to use software against the terms of of the license. In absence of a license, the author retains all rights.