21–30 of 93 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may or may not hold up in court. Best to not use it if you actually want to release all copyrights.
This is potentially a concern for software licensees, but not the author of the work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
WTFPL is not OSI-approved and so briefly held up containerd coming into CNCF. https://github.com/chanezon/toml#about-this-fork
If you disagree that the WTFPL is a useable license, how does forking & relicensing work? Changing the license requires having a license that allows you to do so to the new target license (or ownership of the copyright). But if our assumption is that we reject the WTFPL as a valid license, how can we simultaneously use it to relicense?
I.e., instead of a needing a legal debate about whether the WTFPL allows you to use the code, it would seem to me you trade that for a legal debate about whether the WTFPL allows you to re-license the code.
(At any rate, the upstream relicensed to MIT, and BurntSushi sought agreement from "major contributors, where I interpreted 'major' as '100 lines of code or more.'", so the entire thing appears moot.)
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…
I find it so strange that this is a problem... like the top legal minds of Germany can't figure out how to interpret the concept of public domain from another jurisdiction in a way that's consistent with German law? They can't just make a ruling that says, "OK, everyone consider public domain from other jurisdictions to be the most permissive possible license under German law" and be done with it?
There's a disturbing trend that's similar to Microsoft's Shared Source [1] initiative from last decade, used by GitLab Enterprise [2] and Greensock [3]. The code is available for anyone to download, but is not under an Open Source license. They have the option of accusing their competitors of looking at their source code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/ [3]…
That accusation is possible even with code that's been decompiled, so it's not really any different: A legal claim still requires some sort of proof.
Why not turn this around and default to GPL as "nice and simple"? The introduce the "I don't care about sharing improvements" option for BSD style licenses?
Why not turn this around and default to GPL as "nice and simple"? The introduce the "I don't care about sharing improvements" option for BSD style licenses?
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…
I find it so strange that this is a problem... like the top legal minds of Germany can't figure out how to interpret the concept of public domain from another jurisdiction in a way that's consistent with German law? They can't just make a ruling that says, "OK, everyone consider public domain from other jurisdictions to be the most permissive possible license under German law" and be done with it?
There's a disturbing trend that's similar to Microsoft's Shared Source [1] initiative from last decade, used by GitLab Enterprise [2] and Greensock [3]. The code is available for anyone to download, but is not under an Open Source license. They have the option of accusing their competitors of looking at their source code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/ [3]…
All that can be said today formally about a project is whether or not it's OSI-licensed, rather than whether it's open source. So companies such as GitLab can claim they are "open source" legitimately without using an OSI license--as can SQLite.
Edit: clarity
Some of these licenses are like kryptonite for enterprises. For example, I once wrote an ip address manager in python and licensed it AGPLv3. Two companies reached out to me through Github not to talk about features or bugs, but to demand I change the license to BSD. after a dozen or so random bug reports insisting I had no right to use AGPL, AGPL was not a real license, and even a handful of Outlook meeting invites…