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The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

chrismorgan.info

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Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#111

Post by [deleted] »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #103
hutzlibu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#112

Post by hsn915 »

rwmj wrote: post #99
hsn915 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with CC0 is it's very wordy and very legaleeze, which means I don't want to bother trying to understand it, and potential users won't either. A one-line sentence should be more than enough to clarify my intent.

Trouble is no such sentence exists. There are countries (eg. France) where moral rights are inalienable. There are countries where you cannot put something into the public domain (Germany). Even countries where there isn't such a thing as the public domain. You end up needing to write something which is clearly a license, yet acts like the work is in the public domain, and make it watertight (nearly) worldwide. So yo…

> no such sentence exists

What's wrong with 0BSD?

https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD

"Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted."

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#113

Post by jhardy54 »

freemint wrote: post #72
jhardy54 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the 0BSD. I called it the Free Public License when submitting to OSI, but we changed it to 0BSD because Landley had apparently come up with the same license a few years before me.

Can you post the FPL text? I am wondering whether it was literally the same license.

It’s the same text, which is just the ISC license sans the “ provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies” clause.

The only differences:

- I didn’t use the “Copyright Boaty McBoatface 2022” line, but that’s not a big enough change to justify having two licenses.

- The license was approved as the FPL-1.0.0, which I believe was the first OSI-approved license that user semantic versioning. This isn’t necessary, but I was mildly excited about it.

- The 0BSD doesn’t actually inherit from any other BSD license, the “BSD” bit is more of a spiritual nod that I found more confusing than helpful.

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#115

Post by Brian_K_White »

hsn915 wrote: post #83
samhw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They should change, not me. OK, they should change. Great. They won't, though, so your code won't be usable by them. If that's not a problem, then your code was never really relevant to this discussion. If that is a problem, then shoulds and woulds ain't gonna help.

The purpose of freely distributing code is not to be useful to corporations. It's to foster a spirit of sharing with the community. If I put something up for free, it's because I want other programmers to be able to freely use it. I don't care if a big corporation with expensive lawyers likes the way the license is worded.

But if your license is stupid, then other programmers can not use it. Congratulations.

There is really no excuse for not at some point in your entire programming life, taking the time to go over these things, figure out what they end up meaning in real life, and thereafter knowing which ones actually do represent your wishes and intents. Picking one whos only property is it's so short it doesn't actually do anything hardly counts.

It doesn't really matter how big and complicated a license is any more than how big and complicated a compiled executable is or all the parts in a car. What matters is does it do the job that needs doing. All else being equal, smaller and more elegant is better as a direction or principle of course, but the reason we even have writing is to assemble work into a reusable package, so that time-consuming work like writing a book only has to be done once, and then everyone else gets to use the big complicated work many times over without having to re-create it each time.

It's an efficiency and a power amplifier to be able to pack up a bunch of complicated things into a writing and then treat the writing as a single simple thing.

You happly use gcc (or your car, or whatever) many times every day. You did the work one time to figure out that the tool you need is gcc, and after that, all you mentally think about is just "gcc" not the thousands of lines of code or the millions of machine instructions that make it up every time you use it. If I write a new "The Un-cc" that only has about 8 lines of code and is oh so refreshingly simple to understand, one would hope that you would not use it.

The point of the established and thorough licenses is exactly to do a whole lot of hard work once and let everyone else reuse it countless times.

The point of a stupid new license that pointedly and intentionally does not do any of that hard work is there is no point at all to it. It's just a stupid idea, and as such, it's probably no great loss that other people can not use code from an author who chose such a stupid license.

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#116

Post by mokus »

zarzavat wrote: post #91
hsn915 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with CC0 is it's very wordy and very legaleeze, which means I don't want to bother trying to understand it, and potential users won't either. A one-line sentence should be more than enough to clarify my intent.

Public domain. Concise. Effective. Choose any two. The issue is that donating to the “public domain” isn’t a thing in many jurisdictions, so if you want a license that is effective everywhere then it needs to be wordy. If you are happy to retain copyright and other rights and simply want to grant other people a license to use you work then just use MIT.

I hear this a lot, but what jurisdictions and why? On the face of it, it seems batshit insane to me that there would be a place where I can’t waive my property rights on something.

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#117

Post by Vespasian »

sunflowerdeath wrote: post #45
101008 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the article makes a good point: unlicensed means the opposite. Imagine two people from a corporation having this conversation: 'Can we use this?' 'Yes, it is unlicensed' 'So we cannot, we don't license it' 'No, we can' 'But you said...' and so on...

In the License section I write this text - "Public domain, see the LICENCE file.", and in the text of the license itself the word "unlicense" is also nowhere used.

Then I would not be able to use your code no matter my intentions no matter how well meaning you are.

In my country you cannot dedicate something to the public domain (it happens automatically 70 years after your death).

The Unlicense would most likely allow you or your heirs to come after me and sue me for copyright infringement for many decades.

If you (pretty much) only want US citizens (or naive people) to use your code that's fine. However given that you choose this license it seems like this wasn't your intention..

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#118

Post by Brian_K_White »

Today I introduce the Un-cc!

That old gcc is too big and complicated. In fact all the normal c compilers are too complicated. No one can read them and understand everything. There's thousands of lines of complicated code in there. Even in new reimplimentations like llvm.

So I have a new cc that only has about 8 lines of code. It's refreshinly simple to understand.

This makes it better. Enjoy!

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#119

Post by chrismorgan »

waqf wrote: post #90
chrismorgan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your objection interests me, because these are both cases that I figured out myself with much contemplation and was quite content with many years ago and have never subsequently looked up in any reference (and I doubt your alternatives ever occurred to me). But after a spot of investigation now, I don’t believe you’re right on either count and stick to what I have written, at least for now. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=…

We can do better than "at least sounds reasonable". Wiktionary is a detailed source for etymology (albeit not itself sourced): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let#Etymology_2

In my response I was addressing the specific phrase “let or hindrance”; that let has historically been auto-antonymic is incontrovertible and well-documented and (whether rightly or wrongly) I was interpreting samatman’s comment as referring to the two specific contexts where I say it is still exhibits its historical auto-antonymicity.

Re: The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name

#120

Post by kemitchell »

hannob wrote: post #19

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?

Blue Oak Council, a gaggle of savvy open licensing lawyers, published a model permissive software license: https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0

There's a brief write-up here: https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model

All of us have direct experience with both OSI and FSF license processes. We have no desire to deal with them again. Even for a thoroughly noncontroversial permissive license.

I'm executive director of Blue Oak Council.

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