101–110 of 185 posts
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Is `This work is public domain.` insufficient?
No, 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).
Personally, I think the fact that we even have to talk about the suitability of Unlicense vs CC0 is evidence of how terribly stupid copyright law is. I wrote code, it isn't fancy or interesting and I make no money from it nor do I intend to, and I just want to let everyone know that I truly do not care at all what they do with it. Why is it so hard to let people know that they can use information in the natural way t…
If you're in the US, you can release works into public domain by writing "This is public domain". In other countries, public domain doesn't exist and in order for someone to use a work, there needs to be legal proof that you have the right to use it. Hence the requirement for licenses. In a lot of ways, I prefer the latter approach because it puts the burden of proof on the copier, not the creator.
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Some places, like Germany, don't recognize a public domain at all.
In a way we do, called Gemeinfrei. But the only way to transfer something to it, is dying and waiting 70 years.
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).
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No, 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).
So FOSS contributions are impossible in Europe, or they just take some legal work?
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It 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.
It is. https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0 (Relatively recently.)
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Some places, like Germany, don't recognize a public domain at all.
Well, I imagine they recognize a license saying "you can do anything with this". It probably just has different legal status than public domain.
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In a way we do, called Gemeinfrei. But the only way to transfer something to it, is dying and waiting 70 years.
What 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…
And there we come to the nuance of copyrights, at least in the US: you can't copy the text of the recipe, but the recipe itself don't have protection itself. Specifically, the text of the recipe is literature (which is protected), the recipe itself are instructions (which is not protected). This is the whole justification into clean-room design and reverse-engineering in software.
Also psuedonymous or even anonymous publications do have copyright (insert a legalheap of asterisks here). This actually sadly results into something called "orphan works", where they don't knew (or if they knew cannot find the next-of-kin/successor company/maybe even the government where the company was incorporated) where they can ask for permission.
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No, 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).
So FOSS contributions are impossible in Europe, or they just take some legal work?
For one example, in Sweden you can never fully sign away the right to have creative work attributed to your name (until 50/70 years after creation/creator death, depending on nature of the work) as a creator. You can make a pinky promise to not claim that right, but you can’t fully waive it so you could always have a change of heart and demand to be credited by name later. IIRC this came from a notion of protecting artists and photographers from predatory contracts from the print industry or something similar.
Commercial rights etc can all be fully transferred, of course.
how does WTFPL compare to this?
If you want an approximately-public-domain license that seems pretty sincere but the same lawyers say isn't officious enough, you want Unlicense.
If you want an approximately-public-domain license that lawyers seem to think is quite nice, but that's more for cultural work than software, and whose creators don't recommend it be used for software, you want CC0.
If you want an approximately-public-domain license with a much more famous sibling, and plenty of lawyers say the sibling is good, you want 0BSD.
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?
0BSD? https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD
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.