On Sun, Jan 8, 2012, at 06:10 PM, Charles Plessy wrote: > if you and the other contributors are not worried that your works > will be used in proprietary derivatives, it may be most simple to > take extremely liberal licenses, like the Unlicense, or to explore > the way the Translation Project does, that is to promise to not > exert copyrights. > > http://unlicense.org/ > > http://translationproject.org/html/whydisclaim.html
Charles, I think if you're looking for a public domain statement for the Translation Project, I'd use the C0 instead of Unlicense. The C0 license is endorsed by the FSF and will likely be listed as a valid open source license by the OSI. By contrast, the Unlicense is viewed by some legal professionals as being quite problematic. There was a brief mention of Unlicense on the OSI's license-review list this past week, here's a quote from Rick Moen: | I hadn't seen Unlicense before now, but my immediate impression is that | it's not well formed and should be avoided. | | Its first sentence professes to put the covered work into the public | domain. However, then the second sentence professes to grant reserved | rights under copyright law. However, who is granting those rights, the | erstwhile copyright holder who, one sentence earlier, professed to | destroy his or her own title? | | By contrast, CC0 states explicitly that the current copyright holder | is attempting (I paraphrase) to the extent permitted by local law to | disavow in perpetuity and on behalf of all successors all reserved | rights, and _if that is locally unsuccessful_ grants a permissive | license under his/her powers as copyright owner. | | I realize there are a whole lot of software engineers out there who'd | like to handwave copyright law out of their lives (including you), but | it'd be really nice if they'd occasionally bother to consult suitable | legal help before shooting themselves and others in the foot. If you're interested in more, here is a followup message. http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/000052.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1326034309.31174.140661020729...@webmail.messagingengine.com