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......"  ;)

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

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>

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

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.

Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

tav — 2011-01-26T03:56:35

Hi Arto, Mike et al.

First of all, congrats for coming up with the term "Unlicense". It's
genius! As someone who has been placing all of his work into the
public domain for most of the last decade, I am very thankful that
there is finally a concrete movement emerging around unlicensing.

Now, if it's okay with you, I'd like to share my journey into the
world of public domain and gradually build up to a proposal of a
"Creative Commons Unlicense".


# Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

They got me before I'd even hit puberty. The UK Intellectual Property
Office that is. At school they handed out leaflets on Copyright,
Trademarks and Patents. I was mesmerised. Having already written 2
books on music and working on various inventions, it was truly
empowering to know that the law would protect my rights as a creator.

Being able to dictate how your work is used. Being able to make money
from the royalties generated by your work. Being able to prevent
others from abusing your work for their own profit. It made perfect
sense. It appealed to that primal desire for being in control.

I was so in love with intellectual property that even my school notes
had a copyright statement at the bottom of each page. This continued
all the way till I was 17 when I started my first company. Being a
tech startup in 1999, it wasn't too long before an inevitable
encounter with the open source movement.

As you can imagine, this was quite an experience. In fact, it's really
nice to see some familiar faces from those times on this list: Mike
Linksvayer (from Bitzi days) and Peter Saint-Andre (from the early
Jabber days).

It took a few months, but by the time 2000 began, I was convinced of
the merits of open source. The copyleft nature of the GPL assuaged my
fears of having my work exploited by others. And the success of
projects like Linux and companies like VA Linux Systems served as
tangible proof that sharing worked.

And so I became one of those annoying free software fanatics. I am
sorry to say that I wasted countless hours arguing on various internet
forums about the merits of the GPL versus other licenses. But, on the
flip side, I did acquire various proprietary initiatives and release
them as free software.

In any case, it was an uphill struggle convincing investors of the
merits of open source. It simply did not make sense to them. Many
refused to invest for that reason alone. And, all the while, I kept to
my belief that a billion-dollar industry was possible by enabling
creators to make money from sharing their works openly.

And then finally, in either late 2001 or early 2002, one of my
friends, Tavin Cole, decided to spend an entire day of his life
questioning my stance on the GPL. To this day I am extremely grateful
for his effort — he enlightened me on the merits of the public domain.

In essence, his argument revolved around the fact that copyleft is
merely an act of control and true freedom would be to enable people to
do whatever they pleased with your work. He correctly identified fear
as being a prime motivator behind my love affair with the GPL and that
life would be a lot more pleasant without being gripped by it.

With my belief in the GPL shaken, I started experimenting with the
public domain. Python hackers seemed to public domain their work with
a single line, so I adopted a similar practice and added a minimal
header of the format:

    # Released into the Public Domain by tav <tav< at >espians.com>

This worked out quite well until 2004 when I moved to Berlin for a
year. Here I came across various German hackers who argued that it was
impossible to place works into the public domain due to the
consideration of moral rights under German law.

I experimented with various structures to try and resolve this issue,
e.g. contracts between the individuals and a company based in the UK
which would then release the intellectual property into the public
domain, etc. But nothing was really satisfactory until Creative
Commons released the CC0 license.

It cleverly combined the public domain dedication with a fallback
public license for jurisdictions where one can't fully public domain
one's work. Not understanding why CC0 can't be used for code, I
adopted the license with enthusiasm and remixed it with a grant of
patent rights to create a Public Domain License which I've been using
for all my work — writing, code, designs, etc.


# Creative Commons Unlicense

As you can imagine, it sounded silly to be public domain-ing work
under the Public Domain *License* — but it seemed good enough.
However, once I heard about "Unlicense", I was smitten by its
awesomeness and have already migrated a few projects, e.g.

* https://github.com/tav/ampify
* https://github.com/tav/git-review

Now, whilst I've adopted the term wholesale, the text on unlicense.org
doesn't address a number of concerns:

* It is limited to just code. Software projects also tend to have
documentation, schemas, graphics, etc. It would be nice if the
unlicense covered all of these.

* It doesn't address moral rights in any way.

* It doesn't address patent rights in any way. This becomes even more
relevant when you're receiving patches from organisations who might
hold relevant patents.

* It doesn't provide advice on how to refer to the unlicense within
individual files. I've taken to having the following minimal header
instead of copying the entire text into every file:

    # Public Domain (-) 2010-2011 The Ampify Authors.
    # See the Ampify UNLICENSE file for details.

* It doesn't address third party code. Putting an UNLICENSE file in
the root of the repository without such consideration suggests that
all the code files are in the public domain — which may not be true.

In an ideal world, we'd all come together and build on CC0 and the
Unlicense to create a *Creative Commons Unlicense* which addresses all
of these concerns. I am not sure if this would be of interest to
anyone else, but it is of interest to me.

I've had a go at remixing the various texts into a new Unlicense:

* http://ampify.it/unlicense.html

Here is the raw text, including the accompanying authors file:

* https://github.com/tav/ampify/blob/master/UNLICENSE
* https://github.com/tav/ampify/blob/master/AUTHORS

Now I am not a lawyer and the text needs work, but I hope it's a good
starting point — or, at the very least, provides some idea of what I'm
getting at.

Is this of interest to any of you? Could we come together to manifest
a Creative Commons Unlicense?

Please do let me know what you think.

The Unlicense: The First Year in Review

Arto Bendiken — 2011-01-02T08:59:01

As promised, the first-year review blog post. I've included the
plain-text content inline here so as to make it easy to respond to and
comment on any given paragraph.

Note that I had intended to include more details and some specific
project descriptions, but I'm presently sorely pressed for time so
those will have to wait for another post.

http://ar.to/2011/01/unlicense-1st-year

It's Public Domain Day again, and it's now been exactly a year since I
first introduced the Unlicense.org initiative: an easy-to-use template
and process intended to help coders waive their copyright and dedicate
all their code to the public domain with no strings attached. It seems
a good time for a brief recap of the happenings on this front over the
last 365 days.

A year ago, the first three hackers to adopt the Unlicense were Ben
Lavender, Zachary Voase, and I. All open-source software the three of
us have produced in the last year, combined totaling tens of thousands
of lines of code, has been entirely copyright-free. You can "steal" it
all you like, and we just won't care. You can "forget" to attribute
us, and we'll "forget" to give a damn. We have better things to do.
And as it turns out, we're not the only ones to think that way.

The Unlicense initiative grew from numerous coffee-and-beer
discussions the three of us had had throughout the rainy Spanish
winter regarding how we could stop copyrighting the code we were each
publishing as open source. Informed by much previous reading on the
sordid history of copyright, and philosophically speaking no doubt
inspired and prompted by Mike Gogulski's visit in the early winter, we
had each arrived at the same basic dilemma: we wanted out of the
copyright game, but were unsure how it could effectively be done in
practice. Precedent was scarce.

Researching the matter extensively clarified what had to be done, but
also made clear that few others would have been likely to expend such
an effort in figuring it all out. Even if others might otherwise have
been inclined to opt out of copyrighting their code, the perceived
legal morass of the public domain would have incentivized just using
some very permissive license instead. This was a problem that deserved
a solution.

Thus was conceived the legal hack that became the Unlicense, a name I
had come up with after earlier discussions with Peter Saint-Andre and
Vinay Gupta about rebranding the public domain.

As I've previously detailed in Dissecting the Unlicense: Software
Freedom in Four Clauses and a Link, the solution presented by the
Unlicense was heavily inspired by the approach and the process used by
one of the most successful public-domain software projects of all
time, the SQLite database system. If you have a smartphone, you
already have SQLite in your pocket. You also almost certainly have
SQLite on your desktop or laptop. With at the very least 500 million
deployments worldwide, SQLite is everywhere. Its licensing terms, or
more to the point its non-licensing terms, have certainly not impeded
that success; if anything, they have driven its proliferation.

Other significant inspiration and ingredients for the Unlicense were
the hybrid public-domain dedication and copyright waiver approach used
by Creative Commons Zero, as well as the don't-sue-me legalese from
the widely-used MIT/X11 license. A final component was understanding
that open-source software has important established conventions, among
them the LICENSE file, and that beyond everything else we had to also
be able to satisfactorily answer pragmatic questions such as "But
everyone has a license file; hence I need a license file; what do I
put in it?"

When we launched the Unlicense a year ago, we were not at all certain
how it would be received or if it would have any uptake whatsoever.
The immediate reaction was perhaps not greatly encouraging: my initial
blog post topped the Reddit "most controversial" list for a time, the
downvotes eventually winning the day.

This was to be expected, as the target audience for the Unlicense
really consists only of those developers who are already using
permissive licensing; yet copyleft advocates still pretty much
dominate open-source communities, though perceptibly in relative terms
rather less overbearingly than they did a decade before. So, the
Unlicense immediately served to add a new variable and more fuel to
the perennial BSD/MIT vs GPL flamewars. From long conversation threads
on Twitter and Identi.ca, some of the more amusing strong-copyleft
reactions included assertions such as that the Unlicense "allows evil
stuff" and an implication that we might be some sort of a Microsoft
conspiracy. (Bill Gates, we're all ears should you wish to fund
public-domain advocacy.)

There were also positive early signs, however. Most importantly,
external adoption of the Unlicense began immediately. For example,
some programmers initially used the Unlicense for the code snippets
that they published on their blogs, or similarly unlicensed smaller
scripts and utilities that they published on GitHub and elsewhere.
Within a couple of weeks, the popular open-source software blog
OStatic was describing us as a "movement". They may have jumped the
gun on that one a wee bit, but now, a year later, it doesn't seem an
entirely unfitting description.

It's difficult to give estimates of current Unlicense adoption. We
initially tried to maintain a project list on Unlicense.org, but its
current 50-odd listed projects represent only a small subset of the
entirety of Unlicense usage out there today. We still add projects to
the list upon request, but with Google Alerts notifying me of new
unlicensed scripts and projects just about every single day, we've
long since passed the point where that list could be considered
canonical or up to date.

The best estimate I can give, from having semi-actively tracked the
growth of adoption for the last year, is that there must at the very
least now be many hundreds of projects using the Unlicense. I doubt we
have yet crossed the 1,000-project mark, but I'm quite certain that in
another year's time we will have.

Already as of today, Unlicense adopters include a very diverse range
of projects: software libraries, code generators, database abstraction
layers and even database engines, web frameworks, HTML templates,
blogging engines, low-level network utilities, 3D game engines,
command-line utilities, Mac OS X applications, iPhone games, Firefox
and Google Chrome extensions, jQuery plugins, Django packages,
WordPress plugins, Drupal modules, Ubercart and VirtueMart payment
gateways, and much more besides.

The adoption rate is also growing, as makes sense when awareness of
the Unlicense diffuses ever wider, reaching ever more developers.
Since we've done hardly any advocacy other than the rare blog post and
occasional tweet, our growth factors have really only been
word-of-mouth plus any implicit or explicit references in the
documentation of existing unlicensed projects. It seems to have been
enough.

Looking forward to 2011 and beyond, the future of the Unlicense, and
the public domain more generally, looks promising. I recently had the
opportunity to engage in a brief dialogue with Mike Linksvayer, the
vice president of Creative Commons. It turns out that the folks at
Creative Commons are already aware of the Unlicense initiative, and
supportive of it. This is truly gratifying and welcome news indeed.

Mr. Linksvayer relates that though Creative Commons have previously
discouraged using any of their licensing instruments for software,
there has been discussion concerning the application of CC0,
specifically, to cover software as well. This raises the question of
how that might affect the Unlicense initiative or whether existing
Unlicense adopters would be compatible with CC0 code as well; the
answer is simple, due to the public domain being the superset of all
more restrictive licensing arrangements.

Firstly, should CC0 come to be considered an exception to the more
general Creative Commons policy regarding applicability to software,
Mr. Linksvayer sees that as complementary to the Unlicense, not
competitive. Further, both approaches are fully compatible and
interoperable, since both are at base intended as explicit
public-domain dedications and copyright waivers, not licenses per se.
And it's naturally very easy to remix code that has no strings
whatsoever attached to it: there's just nothing to get tangled up in.

If the Unlicense and CC0 both become viable options for publishing
public-domain code, then the choice of which one to use becomes almost
just a question of personal brand preference: those more comfortable
in the mainstream might perhaps be expected to go with CC0, yet others
might still prefer the explicit and strong "opt-out" subtext of the
Unlicense. In any case, both will amount to the same thing:
copyright-free code that anyone can use freely for any purpose without
restriction.

Here's to a great 2011 during which we'll seek to collaborate with
Creative Commons on establishing both the Unlicense and CC0 more
widely, grow the public domain as well as related advocacy and
education efforts, and do our part in serving as the crucial
counterbalance to copyright laws that keep getting ever worse, never
better. Anyone looking to join the conversation should follow
< at >mlinksva and < at >bendiken on Twitter and/or Identi.ca, as well as
consider subscribing to the CC-licenses/CC-community and Unlicense
mailing lists.

Best practice for integrating unlicensed code with other licensed code

chr — 2010-12-26T19:55:40

Hello!

I just wrote a little app that accepts some input and highlights
it using a syntax highlighter.  It's the latter that actually does
the hard work. I wrote in the README that some files (which I
indicated) are *not* public domain (and even added another README
in the directory where those files are located).  Is it enough?
And, in general, what's the best way to integrate PD with other
kind of licenses?

Thanks.

Licensed, License-Free, and Unlicensed Code

Arto Bendiken — 2010-12-19T14:11:29

To address one of the points discussed here with Peter yesterday, i.e.
the "licensing under the Unlicense" contradiction and
misunderstanding, I wrote up the following brief blog post. I include
the plain-text content inline here so as to make it easy to respond to
and comment on any given paragraph.

http://ar.to/2010/12/licensing-and-unlicensing

As discussed on the Unlicense.org mailing list, the notion of
"licensing something under the Unlicense" is a not infrequent
misunderstanding that calls for better explanations as to the
essential difference between licensed, license-free, and unlicensed
code. I will attempt to break it back down to the fundamentals and
work upwards from there.

To begin, it's useful to briefly review what copyright is and isn't.
As Peter Saint-Andre explains in his very readable essay Who's Afraid
of the Public Domain?, copyright is not a natural right. Rather, it is
a government-created distribution monopoly privilege, ostensibly
instituted on utilitarian grounds, and being (since 1988)
automatically granted you whether you want it or not.

Knowing that, be sure to wince a little every time you see that
all-too-familiar statement, "All rights reserved", because there are a
couple of problems with it.

First off, it would be much more accurately restated as "All
privileges retained", since copyright isn't a "right" at all.
Secondly, the statement as a whole, in any form, is entirely
superfluous (since 1988), as it just refers to the prevailing default
state of things: hands off, except if otherwise explicitly and
specifically given permission.

Meaning that if you stumble across some code with no attached
licensing information, copyright laws would have you treat it as "all
privileges retained", even if its author in fact was just trying to
make it available with no strings attached.

So, this then is why the Unlicense is needed: if you never asked to be
a monopolist, even a small-time one, and quite simply have no interest
nor desire to be one, it so happens that you actually need to
explicitly tell your potential users this in the form of a copyright
waiver called a public-domain dedication.

If you don't do this, and just put your software out there without a
license or dedication at all, what you're effectively doing, according
to copyright laws, is slapping the implicit and forbidding "look but
don't touch, and certainly don't copy" license on it. The result is
known as license-free software, and won't exactly help make you or
your software very popular.

By instead adopting the Unlicense for your code, what you're doing is
voluntarily and unequivocally giving up any and all monopoly
privileges granted you by the state and unlicensing your code into the
public domain, that is, the pool of entirely uncopyrighted and
unencumbered works, available for anyone to freely use for any
purpose.

Clearly what you're not doing, then, is "licensing" your software
"using the Unlicense". That would be more than a bit nonsensical: how
could your software be licensed and not licensed at the same time?
It's either one or the other: strings attached or not. The Unlicense
is intended to serve as an actual license only as a fallback strategy
in backward jurisdictions that otherwise have trouble recognizing the
right of authors to voluntarily waive all monopoly privileges enforced
in their name by the state.

Yet we've now seen a project or two with README files that proudly
claim "Copyright (c) 2010 J. Random Hacker. All rights reserved." in
one sentence and then go on to quote from the Unlicense on the very
next line, "This is free and unencumbered software released into the
public domain." Needless to say, those two statements contradict each
other in the worst way.

In fact, I think these specific examples just go to show how deeply
imbedded the notion of copyright still is in Western culture, even as
we're already otherwise taking the first stumbling steps towards a
post-copyright world.

It seems likely that what the authors in question really meant to
convey was simply the equivalent of "Written by J. Random Hacker".
Writing that familiar "Copyright (c)..." had just become so ingrained
a habit that it had practically supplanted the notion of "Written
by..." in their minds -- and in the minds of countless others, myself
certainly included in the not-too-distant past.

Still, the mistaken notion of "licensing something under the
Unlicense" also demonstrates why the Unlicense is sorely needed in the
first place, and why it has already enjoyed significant uptake over
the course of this year: even if (at least in certain arbitrary
regions of North America) releasing something into the public domain
is, in principle, as simple as stating "I hereby...", that can still
present too much cognitive dissonance for people thoroughly inculcated
into the modern "license-to-live" frame of reference.

Thus "but everyone has a license file; hence I need a license file;
what do I put in it?" is but one of the many practical questions the
Unlicense seeks to answer for public-domain software projects, in
essence backporting the copyright-free future into an easy-to-use
format suited to the copyright-afflicted present.

It is perhaps both inevitable and necessary that, at this still
relatively early stage in the ongoing decline of copyright as an
institution, contradictory or confused statements like "licensing
something under the Unlicense" abound. They may even be useful as
conversation starters on how unlicensing code into the public domain
is fundamentally different from merely choosing yet another random
permissive license.

An apt contemporary analogy for elucidating the contrast between
permissive licenses and the public domain might be the "manage
subscriptions" and "unsubscribe" links in some newsletters.

A permissive license is like clicking "manage subscriptions" and
unchecking every option save for "demand attribution". The Unlicense
is like clicking "unsubscribe" and opting out of the copyright game
altogether, ahead of the pack. The fallback strategy of treating the
Unlicense as an actual license is just a workaround for broken
unsubscription systems, making use of "manage subscriptions" to
uncheck all possible options instead.

Perhaps in another decade or so our common discourse will have left
the speed bump of licensing sufficiently far behind in the dustbin of
history that the kinds of contradictions discussed here will be more
readily and more widely recognized as nonsensical. The very name of
initiatives like the Unlicense can help drive that change, bridging us
of the last copyright generation to the bright and unlicensed
post-copyright future.

CC0 and the Unlicense

Arto Bendiken — 2010-12-18T13:08:31

In case it's of interest, I'm engaged in an ongoing Identi.ca
conversation with Mike Linksvayer, the vice president of Creative
Commons:

http://identi.ca/conversation/59986314

In short, the folks at Creative Commons are aware of the Unlicense
initiative, and apparently supportive of it.

They have had discussions of expanding the scope of CC-Zero to cover
code, but if that happens, Mr. Linksvayer sees that as complementary
to the Unlicense since both approaches are compatible and
interoperable, both being at base intended as explicit public domain
dedications and copyright waivers, not licenses per se - save as a
backup strategy for backwards jurisdictions.

If the Unlicense and CC0 both become viable options for publishing
public-domain code, then the choice of which one to use becomes almost
just a question of personal brand preference: those more in the
mainstream might perhaps be expected to go with CC0, yet others (such
as many on this mailing list, no doubt) might still prefer the
explicit and strong "opt-out" subtext of the Unlicense.

Thoughts?

Unlicensing documentation and graphics

kpihkala — 2010-09-29T17:05:52

Hi,

thanks for creating the http://unlicense.org site and easy steps to
dedicate software to public domain. Soon, I hope to be able to release
a nice animation software to public domain.

I have a question about the public domain statement. It explicitly
talks about software: "This is free and unencumbered software released
into the public domain."

What about documentation, graphics and other resources coming with the
software? Can the same statement be used for them or should I use more
applicable statement, such as CC0?

Can I use the weaver mentioned at http://unlicense.org to get
contributors to dedicate docs, graphics etc to public domain? Again,
it talks about software. Should I use some other weaver?

Again, thanks for the web site and let's live in a free world :).

Cheers,
Kari

New Unlicensed project: JavaScipt Object Graph

Jeff Rodriguez — 2010-09-25T22:04:04

Just dropping a note to point out that my project is using the
Unlicense.

http://jsog.sourceforge.net/

Thanks,

Jeff Rodriguez

RDF.rb public domain dedications

Arto Bendiken — 2010-05-20T11:15:21

Hello public-rdf-ruby< at >w3.org folks,

I've pushed out a 0.1.10 release of RDF.rb earlier today, and am now
looking to review, test and merge a number of patches and
contributions that several people (including Pius Uzamere and John
Fieber) have sent me recently via GitHub.

Before I merge these changes, however, I will need to collect public
domain dedications from the authors in question. This is an
unfortunate modern-day legal necessity for ensuring that RDF.rb's code
base, which is 100% in the public domain [1], continues to remain
completely free and unencumbered by any possible copyright claims or
any doubt regarding its legal situation.

So, if you are an aspiring contributor to RDF.rb, I would ask that you
kindly follow the simple & short instructions at [2] and e-mail me (or
much more preferably, this mailing list, so that it's a matter of
public record) a public domain dedication & copyright disclaimer for
the code you wish to contribute.

You can use the three-paragraph waiver at [3] as a template; you just
need to list the URLs that your contributions are for, so go ahead and
change that first line to reference [4] if your contributions are
intended for inclusion into RDF.rb, and add [5] if you've also
committed to a fork of RDF::Spec.

Note that you need to send in a copyright waiver once only, so that I
have it on file, after which I'll be happy to merge your subsequent
pull requests without any extra ado.

Also, I'll be following the FSF's rule of thumb [6] here, according to
which contributions totaling less than 15 lines of new code can safely
be considered "trivial" for legal purposes, in which case no waiver is
needed. Hence I've already previously merged e.g. a small patch [7]
from Pius, which fulfilled these criteria.

I already have a waiver from Ben Lavender, who is the largest
contributor to RDF.rb so far, but I will ask him to re-post it here on
the list as well so as to make it a part of the public record and also
provide an example of the process.

Thank you,
Arto

ANNOUNCE: pdcore

patrick — 2010-03-11T10:56:51

pdcore is a new SourceForge project that aims to create a POSIX.1-2008
compliant public domain implementation of the core UNIX file, shell
and text manipulation utilities.

Project home: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdcore/
Website: http://pdcore.sourceforge.net/

If anyone here feels able to contribute, they would be most welcome.

Public domain archive or directory

Jean-Marc Lienher — 2010-02-02T15:02:31

Hi,

I would like to hear your opinions about a public domain software
directory.

I've started my archive [1] because of two facts:
- The Open Source directories like Freshmeat [2] or SourceForge [3]
are  listing a lot of public domain software. But more than a half of
them are not in the public domain, because their authors think that
P.D . equals "Freeware".
- Some great software disapear from the Internet because their authors
lost interest in maintaining a web site.

So I've descided to check every file of source code that I link on my
web site (but of course without any warranty, I can't say that I make
no mistake).
And I put a copy of the downloaded source code on my web site.

My original intent was to store only C/C++ public domain code.
But I see that python is heavily used in the public domain ecosystem.

I think that I will now link and store any source code no matter what
language is used.
And I need to create a php web page to enable visitors to suggest a
public domain link.

So now the question :

What do you think, is an archive of P.D. software a good thing ?
Or a simple directory is enough ?
Or should we use the Open Directory Project [4] and try to create a
"Top: Computers: Software: Public Domain" category?

---
Jean-Marc Lienher

[1] http://whoow.org/public_domain
[2] http://freshmeat.net/
[3] http://sourceforge.net/
[4] http://www.dmoz.org/

Hi all - just introducing myself.... :)

mooseman — 2010-02-02T06:04:46

Hi all - "mooseman" here.... :)

(  I chose that GitHub nickname because I really like moose - they're
big and dopey and kind of cuddly-looking.... :)   )

Great to be joining this group! It's really good to see that there are
other "public domain" supporters out there - hopefully the numbers
will increase steadily over the next few months and years.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have a repo on GitHub.  If you want
working code from there, your best bet is to go for pdspread and
pdeditor.  Neither are finished yet, but they do work.  By "work", I
mean that -
* In pdeditor, you can run the editor and enter text and scroll
around. ( It even has a simple macro facility to record keystrokes.
That's working too. Press F5 to record keystrokes, and F5 again to
stop recording ).
* In pdspread, running the code creates a spreadsheet that you can
enter data into.
* Note - Neither of the apps can yet open and save files - I hope to
add that functionality soon.

Quite a few other bits and pieces in my repo.  An app called
"teagit" ( I've whimsically called it that because (in reference to
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galazy) - it is "almost, but not quite,
entirely unlike Git."  It's more of a toy app than a real one, at
present, but may be interesting anyway.

At present, I'm getting into my "pdfpc" project - "public-domain
functional programming in C".  To start with, that'll involve code
which does FP manipulations on arrays (head, tail, zip and so on).
I've actually just found a page which has monads done in C.  I don't
know whether the code is P.D. though, so I've contacted the author to
find out.

 That'll do for now. I hope to drop in here regularly to keep up with
what's happening!
Bye for now -
- mooseman