gmane.law.unlicense

Codechu Macroscope

Onur BARLIK — 2013-04-25T22:33:49

Hi,
I've posted a new Project on my page under unlicense, 
please add to your list.
thanks
 
Definition: Codechu Macroscope, keyboard & mouse macro recorder for 
Windows, features repositioning & scaling of mouse movement and altering 
playback speed, developed by Onur Barlık, is in the public domain.
Site: www.codechu.com
Project Page Link: http://www.codechu.com/index.php/138/macroscope/

New nlicensed project: fpgatools

2012-12-17T12:21:51

Fpgatools 
 fpgatools is a toolchain to program field-programmable gate arrays 
(FPGAs). The only supported chip at this time is the xc6slx9, a 7 USD 
45nm-generation fpga with 5720 6-input LUTs, block ram and 
multiply-accumulate devices.

More info: https://github.com/Wolfgang-Spraul/fpgatools

BTW:
 Anyone want help me on upload fpgatools to Debian: 
https://mentors.debian.net/package/fpgatools

ANNOUNCE: pd_readline

Andy Elvey — 2012-09-05T09:18:59

Just a quick message to announce pd_readline - a public-domain readline and 
command-history implementation (using the Unlicense). 
It can be obtained from here - 
https://github.com/mooseman 
It is still a bit alpha-ish (I've had the occasional problem with a 
stack-smash) but it "generally behaves as expected" (for most values of 
"generally"...... ;)  ) 
Give it a go. Compile it, put the "test.txt" file in the same directory 
(that's just a dummy "command-history" file for now), and play around with 
it.  "Share and enjoy......"  ;)

Re: Update on my public domain list

Andy Elvey — 2012-08-08T07:01:20

Sounds good!
  Ok  - I'll check those out too... :)
You're welcome!
Bye for now -
- Andy

RE: Update on my public domain list

Jean-Marc Lienher — 2012-08-07T19:18:35

Yes I already seen this great project. I've just started to
port it to Windows. I hope that I will be able to send a patch
to the author in the next few weeks.

(on the tx3.org web site there a BASIC interpreter and a Scheme
interpreter too. They both are public domain. )

Thanks, 
 Jean-Marc

Re: Update on my public domain list

Andy Elvey — 2012-08-07T06:26:41

Hi!
  Ok - I'll send this on to them and let them know.
  Thanks for that!

  Oh, btw - just thought I'd mention an interesting project that I came 
across recently - this one -
http://www.t3x.org/subc/index.html

It's for the public-domain "SubC" compiler, for a subset of C.  Just 
thought I'd mention it in case the code may be of use to you.... :)
Bye for now -
- Andy


On 07/08/12 07:51, Jean-Marc Lienher wrote:

Update on my public domain list

Jean-Marc Lienher — 2012-08-06T19:51:19

Hi,

I moved my list and archive of public domain software to 
http://www.cod5.org/archive .
I added some new entries, but it's always mainly C source code.

I'm not anymore the owner of whoow.org, so could you update the 
unlicense.org page ?

Thanks in advance.

 Jean-Marc

Re: Unlicense not to be reviewed by the OSI

Mike Linksvayer — 2012-03-06T21:33:05

I mentioned it, but following up to a very old thread
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/unlicense/an9PHJ0NGxA/5xNx1k09_WUJ


It can be reviewed if someone submits it. If someone does, I'd expect
criticism of it to be harsh.


A bit sad, but having the backing of a large organization is not
strictly necessary; obviously a number of projects are using
Unlicense, Ampify Unlicense, CC0, various ad hoc public domain
dedications, without OSI approval. I think it is a good thing in the
longer term, if it spurs development of more aggressive public domain
dedications ... I'lll mention again the blog post where I expanded on
this http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2012/02/25/permissions/

Mike

Unlicense not to be reviewed by the OSI

Gioele Barabucci — 2012-03-06T20:53:48

It looks like the thread from the license-review< at >opensource.org ml 
somehow did not get to this mailing list.

Unlicense will not be reviewed by the OSI because it is a "crayon" 
licence (i.e. drafted by non legal professionals). Such licences have 
been problematic in the past. 
http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/000047.html

Although Unlicense will not be reviewed, some (supposed) flaws have been 
highlighted. 
http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/000052.html

To summarise: Unlicense has little chance of being reviewed by the OSI, 
let alone approved.

In the same news, CC0 has been withdrawn from the OSI process. 
http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-February/000233.html

All this is sad, it is 2012 and yet there are no easy ways (backed by 
major organisations) to dedicate software to the public domain .

--
Gioele Barabucci <gioele< at >svario.it>

Re: Re: CC0 and the Unlicense

Mike Linksvayer — 2012-02-28T18:07:56

The Unlicense was mentioned a few times (once in vain) in recent 
license-review and license-discuss threads about CC0, archives at 
http://opensource.org/lists

My overwrought post on the threads at 
http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2012/02/25/permissions/ mentions Tav's 
variation. My point is that we should be more demanding and aggressive 
about abandoning all possible restrictions.

Speaking of Tav's http://ampify.it/unlicense.html I wonder about patent 
termination for aggressors in a public domain dedication. I understand why 
such provisions exist in licenses, and I see the language is copied from 
that used at http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/ and other 
Google projects.

Creative Commons is working on version 4.0 of its licenses now. I expect 
any future version of CC0 to be pretty far in the future, but I think 
people interested in public domain dedications or unlicenses if one wishes 
to say that generally ought be thinking about these issues...

Mike

Re: question about contributor copyright waivers

Kyle — 2011-09-09T22:32:50

OK, well that pretty much answers my question. I can setup a mailing 
list very easily. I was just trying to make contributing as painless for 
the contributor as possible, and I thought an implied waiver would do 
that, but it does seem better to have a mailing list where major 
contributors can post their individual waivers for archival. From your 
project, it looks like the implied waiver should be fine for small 
patches, so I'll likely document that in my policies for contributing 
code. Looks like I should be safe saying something like:

"By contributing code to this project, you agree to waive your 
copyrights and to place your contribution into the public domain. For 
patches consisting of 5 lines of code or more, please post an official 
waiver of copyright to the mailing list at ..."

I would link to something similar to the SQLite waiver that can be 
copied and pasted into the email that the individual major contributor 
would send to the list along with his/her name. Does this cover all my 
bases? It seems strange to live in a time where it is easier to assert 
copyright restrictions than to allow people the freedom to use my code 
without fear. Thanks much for the help.
~Kyle

Re: question about contributor copyright waivers

Ben Lavender — 2011-09-09T19:15:58

For rdf.rb, we did a GNU-ish 'official agreements from big contributors,
don't worry about it for a few lines of fixes'. We made them post the
agreements to a mailing list. We got some companies to vaguely sponsor their
employees' letters.

Beyond that, nobody ever sued anyone so I doubt anyone can give useful legal
advice here.

Ben

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Kyle <kyle< at >gmx.ca> wrote:

question about contributor copyright waivers

Kyle — 2011-09-04T18:48:04

Is it safe to state clearly, either by modifying the text of the Unlicense to include contributors, or by making a note in a separate location, that anyone who contributes code or documentation to my project understands that they have agreed to waive their copyrights when they agree to submit their contribution, or is it still better to collect a waiver of copyright from each individual contributor? I suppose the waivers could be collected along with individual names in a CONTRIBUTORS file, but is it really necessary in the days of implied agreement, e.g. "by using this, you agree to the terms and conditions..." this may seem like a rather silly question, but I really don't have the ability to pay lawyers in case something goes wrong, so I guess I just need to be sure all my bases are covered in the simplest way possible. Thanks for any advice.
~Kyle
Sent from my Wishdroid! :)

Unlicensed project: PicoSpeaker

Kyle — 2011-09-03T20:00:10

I am proud to announce the availability of PicoSpeaker
http://picospeaker.tk
as unlicensed code. Furthermore, the website itself has been dedicated
to the public domain and includes a link in the footer to download the
complete website source code.

PicoSpeaker is a control interface to the SVox Pico speech synthesis
engine written in Python. SVox Pico is the voice of Android phones,
but the code has been ported to Linux and Windows. PicoSpeaker is
designed to run on Linux or any other Unix-like OS that has access to
Sox and the pico2wave utility available with the SVox Pico
distribution. It provides volume, rate and pitch controls that are not
available in the sample command-line pico2wave utility and can speak
directly through the computer's sound device or save to a file. I
currently use this along with a Speech-dispatcher configuration file
to allow my computer to speak to me using this very nice voice and the
Orca screen reader.

As I am a firm believer in freedom of expression, and as I feel that
the best way to allow anyone the true freedom to use my work for any
purpose without restriction is to release it into the public domain, I
would very much appreciate a listing for PicoSpeaker on the
unlicense.org website in the Unlicensed Free Software section. Thanks
very much for the hard work and great contribution to the public
domain, and I hope that many more people learn of its benefits, both
for software and for many other works.
~Kyle

Please include Kopyleft

Jeff — 2011-07-03T09:22:32

(K) ALL RIGHTS REVERSED - Reprint what you like

From http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/82.php

new Unlicensed project: miniz

richgel99 — 2011-05-28T22:29:20

Just dropping a note that the "miniz" project uses the Unlicense:

http://code.google.com/p/miniz/

miniz is a lossless (standard Deflate/Inflate), high performance
compression library with a zlib-compatible API in a single C source
file. It also contains a set of optional functions for .ZIP archive
reading and writing, and .PNG image writing.

Thanks,
Rich Geldreich

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

Charles — 2011-04-29T14:11:47

Want to say I am interested in helping this discussion get to where
its destination. On that note, a "unified" PD license should include
something like "how to Obtaining An Explicit License To Use this work"
as in sqlite which is public domain software, but also sells licenses
for those who want them <http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html>

I'm new around here, and if you're interested some relevant work of
mine on this subject from my lab <http://mr.danoff.org> is a report
"Exploring how to release something into the public domain" <http://
www.danoff.org/leftinfront/?p=1639> and a short video "The Public
Domain Paradox" <http://www.archive.org/details/
ThePublicDomainParadox>.

- Charles

--
Charles Jeffrey Danoff
Lab: http://mr.danoff.org
Home: http://danoff.org

On Apr 15, 9:46 am, Peter Saint-Andre <stpe...< at >stpeter.im> wrote:

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

Peter Saint-Andre — 2011-04-15T14:46:09

Mike, thanks for sharing the good news and for all the work you folks
did to make this possible.

For further discussion, I notice that the FSF's free license list
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> also says:

###

The Unlicense

    The Unlicense is a public domain dedication. A work released under
the Unlicense is dedicated to the public domain to the fullest extent
permitted by law, and also comes with an additional simple license that
helps cover any cases where the dedication is inadequate. Both public
domain works and the simple license provided by the Unlicense are
compatible with the GNU GPL.

    If you want to release your work to the public domain, we recommend
you use CC0. CC0 also provides a public domain dedication with a
fallback license, and is more thorough and mature than the Unlicense.

###

Because I'm not a fan of license proliferation (I worked to deprecate
the old Jabber Open Source License or JOSL in the XMPP community), I
look forward to further discussion about working on a "unified" PD
license. However, first I need to revisit Tav's message and dedicate
some thinking time to the underlying issues...

Peter

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

Mike Linksvayer — 2011-04-15T13:32:57

Hi Tav and all,

Extremely cool to run into you again, here.

I will attempt to add to this thread at length soon. I like the ideas
Tav brought up. Will take a really long time to make happen as a CC
tool (CC0 2.0 or whatever), simply because CC moves very slowly and
carefully on new instruments, which is mostly a good thing.

I'm prompted to respond at all now because there has been discussion
of public domain software instruments with FSF and others, leading to
them adding CC0 to their licenses list, and CC adding deployment
instructions for CC0 and software (lack of which I think I mentioned
previously as a barrier to use).

See https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27081

Mike

Errata in 'Dissecting the Unlicense'

Marius Kempe — 2011-02-23T15:03:44

Hi,

I love the Unlicense and have started using it for my small scientific
projects. I noticed one piece of errata in 'Dissecting the
Unlicense' (http://ar.to/2010/01/dissecting-the-unlicense) that I
think is misleading and needs to be fixed:

in section §2, 'The Freedoms', one reads:


I don't think that you can, in general, legally relicense code, or any
content, that has been put into the public domain, because this
implies you are claiming copyright over it. This makes it copyfraud.
As evidence I submit the Wikipedia entry on copyfraud -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/copyfraud - and this article by a legal
scholar, pointing out how common copyfraud is today and arguing that
it is a major problem: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244

So I would advocate changing this line ASAP.

Best,
Marius

PS. I am not a lawyer.

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

Ben Lavender — 2011-01-26T08:51:17

Tav, I'd like to take a quick stab at addressing some of your concerns
as Arto and I saw them when we were working on it (and let me just say
that while 'we' is appropriate for 'working on it', every word was
written by Arto):


On purpose. The various issues involved for non-code IP and code IP
are separate. They warrant separate paperwork. CC has published
statements amounting to the same.


Correct. Specifically addressing moral rights incorrectly is a
problem, and having recently tried to do this for a real-life thing,
it's a huge, huge issue, different in many countries, and all but
impossible to get right. It can take pages and pages in Germany.

But one has to remember that contracts are not parsed by computers,
but humans. If a particular contract is invalid in a jurisdiction, a
*judge* will generally attempt to determine intent. The unlicense is
designed to stand quite well as a statement of intent in jurisdictions
that do not respect public domain assignments.

Curiously, it can be better to be *less specific* and allow a human
being, one day, in a court, to use common sense.


Same issue as licenses. Can't be helped.


See above about humans parsing contracts, not computers. You can of
course put that in every file, but:
 * Someone interpreting the unlicense PD assignment won't need it.
The unlicense is clear.
 * I can just strip those statements out and republish the public
domain work. Why bother?


Same issue as licensing. I put a 'gotcha' about other code at the top
of my unlicense file when including licensed code.



This is dangerous in jurisdictions that have inalienable moral rights.
If you assign a license at all, and don't do it right, you can be
screwed.

For example, I learned not 2 weeks ago that this line from your document:

"In addition, to the extent the Waiver is so judged Affirmer hereby
grants to each affected person a royalty-free, non transferable, non
sublicensable, non exclusive, irrevocable and unconditional license to
exercise"

makes this an invalid contract in Germany, as there's no such thing as
an irrevocable license; there are always some circumstances that allow
an author or  his heirs to retake control, and you have to account for
them in excruciating detail. You'd have been better off not to use the
word 'license' at all, and let a judge interpret it. You do have some
good language about 'if this is found to be invalid, use this as a
statement of intent, and apply it insofar as is possible', and that
may be a good idea, but the existing unlicense is pretty clear and
that's what would happen anyway. It might be an update worth doing.

You have patent language that may or may not be a good idea that I
can't speak any kind of intelligently about it. I don't know that some
of the corporate signoffs to RDF.rb would have happened with it
included.

BTW, I'm not a lawyer, and my lawyer would have me clearly say that
none of this is legal advice. It's just what I had to pay a lawyer
recently to worry about.

Anyway, I hope this doesn't come across as 'GO AWAY!'. Nothing's
perfect, and I see no reason to necessarily consider the unlicense a
final version, so this stuff can always be talked about. Just
addressing how we saw some of your concerns a year ago.

And a big welcome to the club!

Ben