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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

#161

Post by hsn915 »

rwmj wrote: post #157
hsn915 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

Well you missed out the second paragraph is the first problem. Not being a lawyer I can only speculate on other problems. It doesn't get around the problem of moral rights, so probably doesn't work in France.

The second paragraph is so common that you can safely skim/skip it without loss.

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

#162

Post by funstuff007 »

HellsMaddy wrote: post #20
funstuff007 wrote: post #9

Nathan Myhrvold is already building a business plan around this license's faults. i.e. reversibility of grant in perpetuity.

Care to elaborate?

https://www.engadget.com/2012-05-30-intellectual-ventures-na...

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

#163

Post by 3np »

germanier wrote: post #106
marcosdumay wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I imagine they recognize a license saying "you can do anything with this". It probably just has different legal status than public domain.

No. There are certain rights to a work you cannot waive, no matter how much you want to. Even less without actually specifying what "anything" entails.

While you can not waive certain rights, you absolutely can proclaim "you can do anything with this". You can choose to not exercise your legal right to attribution, for example. So what you’re saying is not in conflict with the person you’re replying to.

(You can argue that there’s some legal risk at hand here; for example, if someone writes a book with the above and you start selling copies of it claiming you wrote it, the author can still come back and demand that you credit them as author and have that right enforced in court)

I think this is great. Case in point: blanket EULA for an image sharing site can not remove your right to be attributed, should your photo end up in an ad campaign or a newspaper. This means that many European newspapers actually make sure to not misattribute photographs, which has the side-effect of improving transparency in news reporting. So grabbing a photo online and wrongfully claiming it’s from the wrong time, place and source is not something that tends to happen in practice. And if it does, there’s a clear path to recourse that doesn’t require "lawyering up", you just file a claim with evidence.

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

#164

Post by zinekeller »

Jach wrote: post #145
zinekeller wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Nevertheless I suspect sqlite is used in Europe or parts of Asia without trouble.

1) Hipp, Wyrick & Company, Inc. (Hwaci, the legal owner of the code) does not actively enforce its rights available. This does not mean it will not affect operations in certain countries, while computer code is not (yet) affected, music definitely is (see GEMA in Germany). Additionally, in an adverse purchase of a company Hwaci could be bought by a scrupulous corporation (à la patent trolls of today) and enforce the copyright in countries where Hwaci has residual rights. If somehow that did not happen but Hwaci faces bankruptcy and wound up in favour to the State of North Carolina (the default option), we will have a similar problem as a particular Canadian company that unfortunately currently escapes my mind. This is what worries large companies: a permissive license which is recognised internationally cannot be annulled (unless they breached the very simple requirement), sure for new users it would suck (even GPL doesn't close the hole), but the new company cannot sue companies with existing licences because they have a very permissive license.

2) Actually, SQLite has this: https://www.sqlite.org/purchase/license

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

#165

Post by Seirdy »

683686285 wrote: post #159
goodpoint wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretending we are living in a post-copyright utopia severely limits the reach of your work And severely limits the freedom of end users! GPLv3 protects around tivoization and proprietarization. Other licenses do not. The net effect is that end users are unable to benefit from the openness.

Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it. To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as c…

The only thing that the GPL family prevents is coercion, effectively reaching a local minima of coercion-by-others as a function of coercion-by-vendor.

Granting the freedom to coerce doesn't reduce coercion.

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

#166

Post by chrismorgan »

kemitchell wrote: post #138
mattarm wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of us have direct experience with both OSI and FSF license processes. We have no desire to deal with them again. As a more casual person looking to use a license, this is basically the opposite of what I want to read. As a non-lawyer, I have little chance of vetting a license myself. As a person with life experience, I have full appreciation for the delicacy of these kinds of licenses and legal issues. If a lic…

I've written a bit on my experiences with OSI review in particular, and also the list of licenses it has approved. See, e.g., https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/05/05/Rely-on-OSI.html . In a nutshell: people think there's a team of lawyers back there, counting angels on the heads of fine legal pins. But it's actually a highly politicized mailman list where activist-types do most of the talking. I put energy into cof…

Thanks for chipping in on this thread, you’re expressing things nice and clearly, now I have a few more links for describing this unhappy situation in open-source licensing.

Any chance you could change the slug on that first link from Rely-on-OSI to Dont-Rely-on-OSI-Approval or similar? The current URL suggests the opposite of the article’s content. Hopefully adding a redirect isn’t too onerous.

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

#167

Post by seba_dos1 »

683686285 wrote: post #159
goodpoint wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretending we are living in a post-copyright utopia severely limits the reach of your work And severely limits the freedom of end users! GPLv3 protects around tivoization and proprietarization. Other licenses do not. The net effect is that end users are unable to benefit from the openness.

Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it. To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as c…

You're right that in a universe where everyone grants their end users necessary freedoms and don't use coercion to limit those rights, GPL would be completely unnecessary. Until that happens, coercing people to stop further coercion is the best thing we have.

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

#168

Post by ksec »

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.

>isn’t a thing in many jurisdictions

I try to look this up and there isn't a concrete answer. There are countries with no or unclear Copyright terms, but I cant find countries with no public domain.

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #36
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?

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

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by iudqnolq »

ksec wrote: post #168
zarzavat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>isn’t a thing in many jurisdictions I try to look this up and there isn't a concrete answer. There are countries with no or unclear Copyright terms, but I cant find countries with no public domain.

One example is in Germany you can't give up all your rights (the sticky rights are often called "moral rights"). In that case you want to fallback to a permissive license.
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