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 b

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 m

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 c

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 (sinc

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

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;

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 questio

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 ap