Open Source License Helper Tool

#1

Post by ethanpil » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

Open Source License Helper Tool
choosealicense.com

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#2

Post by nisabek » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

our team has this link pinned in slack - very useful, normal human language used to explain!

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#3

Post by stockkid » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

I have used this tool many times to copy & paste appropriate licenses to my projects. Very helpful.

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#4

Post by recluse00 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#5

Post by mlinksva » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

recluse00 wrote: post #4

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

It's listed in https://choosealicense.com/appendix/

The point of the home page is to make it easy to choose a license, not to list every possible choice.

(I occasionally help maintain https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com which is the source for the site.)

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#6

Post by WorldMaker » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

recluse00 wrote: post #4

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

It's not an OSI recognized license.

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#7

Post by niftich » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

This is the same one built into GitHub's onboarding flow. It greatly aids understanding by laypeople, and goes a long way towards bridging the awkward divide between making one's labor permissively available, and navigating the very specialized field of intellectual property rights.

I do wish the drilldown for placing software into the public domain would suggest CC0 over the Unlicense. CC0 is more precise, is backed by both a foundation and large organizations, and pre-dates it by several years.

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#8

Post by q3k » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 11:10 PM UTC

recluse00 wrote: post #4

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

Fun fact: at least one large company I worked with explicitly internally documented WTFPL-licensed software as unable to be merged into their codebase, because lawyers. Cf. MIT/BSD/Apache/ISC/CC-BY/CC0 that were all fine.

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#9

Post by vortico » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 11:26 PM UTC

recluse00 wrote: post #4

No WTFPL? I'm disappointed.

That may or may not hold up in court. Best to not use it if you actually want to release all copyrights.

Re: Open Source License Helper Tool

#10

Post by vortico » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 11:27 PM UTC

May I recommend replacing The Unlicense with CC0? (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode). It has all the same bullet points except is a bit tighter in countries where a public domain release is not legally valid.

Unfortunately it is more difficult to release works into the public domain than The Unlicense addresses. The Unlicense is likely sufficient for all foreseen cases in countries except Germany and France (to my knowledge), but CC0 is written beautifully with a double-fallback to completely waiver all rights in all jurisdictions.

Here are some analyses:

- https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-... Why this is okay to use for software.

- https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kre... concludes that it is sufficient in German law.

- https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain It is recommended by the FSF as a prefered method for releasing source code into the public domain.