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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

#91

Post by zarzavat »

hsn915 wrote: post #84
_ZeD_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't it cc0?

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.

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

#92

Post by marcosdumay »

Taywee wrote: post #68
ravenstine wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious... if Creative Commons can't even create a public domain license that applies to both US and Europe, then what would it actually take to do so? Seems insane that any system can't accept "this is public domain" as all you need.

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.

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

#93

Post by ghaff »

gnud wrote: post #55
m0llusk wrote: post #52

The way people and organizations stand in the way of public domain releases is beyond rude to the point of genuine evil. My code is just code. It should be possible to let all others read it without obligation. There must be some way to restrain this relentless desire to cocoon everything in layers of legal entanglement. It is just code and I as the author desire others to be able to read it. This is not a crazy plot…

> My code is not theirs and this is the core issue. This is _exactly_ why a lot of jurisdictions assign/assume copyright by default, and make it hard to 'remove'. Otherwise authors would see their work ripped off in a lot of inventive ways. When the default state is that every work is copyrighted, that removes a lot of possible confusion, and possible excuses.

Right. Under the older copyright regime in the US, you more or less had to add the appropriate incantation/symbols and send a copy to the Library of Congress or you pretty much had no leg to stand on collecting compensation if Disney or whoever decided to rip you off. The US decided that wasn't a good thing and that works should be copyrighted automatically. (Registration still has some benefits for collecting on copyright claims.) But that also means you now need to get rid of that automatic copyright, assuming you can, if you want to do so.

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

#94

Post by smasher164 »

donatj wrote: post #87
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?

MIT-0 is pretty close as well. https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0

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.

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

#95

Post by ghaff »

smasher164 wrote: post #94
donatj wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT-0 is pretty close as well. https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT-0

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.)

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

#96

Post by marcosdumay »

683686285 wrote: post #14
contravariant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably allowing your work to be used by anyone except Google is a feature not a bug.

I assume Google's legal department is not irrational and that they are worrying about something that could happen to anyone.

Hum... Rational (from the point of view of the entire enterprise) bureaucracy bodies probably exist, but they are not common. But that second part "something that could happen to anyone" is completely unfounded. It may be because of something that could happen to you, or it may not. There is no reason to assume either way.

As people keep ignoring on the context of software architecture, you are not Google.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by rwmj »

hsn915 wrote: post #84
_ZeD_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't it cc0?

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 you end up with CC0.

Luckily you don't need to write anything very wordy to use CC0. It's actually pretty simple and short at your end. Creative Commons have already done the hard bit.

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

#100

Post by lifthrasiir »

suprfsat wrote: post #97
nsajko wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are merely joke licenses.

What makes it a joke?

For WTFPL, if a parody counts as a joke, the author's own words: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1490... (The author of the version 2, to be exact, but this version is also the widespread version of WTFPL anyway.)
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