Unlicense - One Year of Public Domain Code

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

by gregory80 • 16 years ago

31 11 16 years ago

gregory80• 16 years ago

kinda cool to see creative commons has recognized unlicense as a legitimate alternative for dedicating code to the public domain.

webr3• 16 years ago

great work, unlicense is my go-to license for all projects!

WimLeers• 16 years ago

I'm trying to use the Unlicense whenever I can. I'm even retroactively licensing past open source projects (and many projects I did as part of university classes), to encourage reuse as much as possible.

My sincere thanks to those who worked hard on the Unlicense! :)

thurn• 16 years ago

What's the story on using the Unlicense with libraries under other licenses? I'd love to use it, but I depend on libraries that are under Apache and LGPL licenses. Is it compatible?

arto3• 16 years ago

You can freely incorporate public domain code into a code base licensed under any license whatsoever. For example, as the FSF states in http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html, "Public domain material is compatible with the GNU GPL."

For the other direction, that is, incorporating some copyrighted code into an otherwise copyright-free code base, just be careful to keep the copyrighted files isolated and clearly marked as encumbered, so that nobody accidentally copies anything from them into the unencumbered portions of the code base. See http://groups.google.com/group/unlicense/browse_thread/threa... for more information.

Semiapies3• 16 years ago

"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."

Someone should make a list of them (that goes beyond 50 projects). Without some sort of substantiation, there's no real reason to believe this claim.

arto3• 16 years ago

If you think it that important, feel free to improve upon the list; it's maintained at https://github.com/bendiken/unlicense.org. Fork the repository, update the list, and submit a pull request to merge. Easy as pie.

Given that the list at Unlicense.org doesn't even include all of my own projects, it's really not comprehensive at all. So, here's a tip: just set a couple of Google Alerts (in addition to the obvious "Unlicense", searching also for the first line of text from the Unlicense is particularly effective). Much easier.

Note also that there isn't much point listing hundreds of projects directly on the front page of Unlicense.org. If we wanted to actually be comprehensive, we should do something like a tagged and searchable database of projects. This has been discussed previously, but isn't a priority.

Semiapies3• 16 years ago

I'm not in your "movement" - it's not my responsibility to provide the evidence just because I'm the first person to bother saying citation needed on a broad, unsubstantiated claim like that.

lawfulfalafel• 16 years ago

I really wish there was a license that forced developers after a certain amount of profit/time they would make their code open source. I would buy a lot more software if I knew I was supporting something that is useful and would soon be free for all. That sort of license could be really beneficial for developers who want to work on small open source projects full time.

Unlicense - One Year of Public Domain Code

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