On 01/16/2015 11:16 AM, stephen Turner wrote:
> I found a permissive licese same as your 0-clause but listed on the
> internet under http://unlicense.org  

Yeah, they found me last year:
https://twitter.com/theunlicense/status/451665489929183232

Another big public domain license is CC0 from the creative commons guys:

http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Or just a simple statement like libtomcrypt and libtommath (at the heart
of dropbear) use:

https://secure.ucc.asn.au/hg/dropbear/file/8d0c33e8ddab/libtommath/LICENSE
https://secure.ucc.asn.au/hg/dropbear/file/8d0c33e8ddab/libtomcrypt/LICENSE

The nice thing about the public domain is that if you take code from one
such project and put it into another such project, you don't have to
change your license text. They're all compatible with each other, they
collapse together just like GPL software used to back when there was
just one version. (Universal donor vs universal receiver.)

The thing about BSD (2/3/4 clause) vs MIT vs Apache is they're all
trying to do exactly the same thing, but do so in incompatible ways that
make transplanting code between projects awkward.

And the _only_ diference between them and public domain licenses is "you
must copy this license text verbatim into all derived works", which is
exactly the thing that makes them incompatible wih each other. Kinda
self-defeating, that.

Literally all I did to create my "zero clause BSD" was remove the
half-sentence of the 2 clause (netbsd?) license that required you to
copy this specific license text verbatim into derived works.

http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/818

That half-sentence was a _bug_ that causes incompatibility, and performs
no other obvious function. The toybox source is on the web. If people do
plagiarize it, turns out the internet is really good at finding plagiarism:

http://www.miketyndall.com/todd_goldman/
http://time.com/3491095/john-walsh-plagiarism/
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/31/rand-paul-accused-of-wikipedia-plagiarism/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Friendly#Plagiarism
http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Cassandra_Claire_Plagiarism_Debacle

Note that plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright. You can
plagiarize shakespeare or sherlock holmes and that it's not always a bad
thing:

http://fadeaccompli.tumblr.com/post/108256550398/twinkleofafadingstar-so-charlotte-bronte

I want people to use my stuff. I want to make it as easy as possible
_for_ them to use my stuff. Attribution is nice, but suing people to get
it means something is wrong. I can always write _more_ code...

(The busybox license enforcement suits I started in 2006 were never
about attribution, they were about getting code into the busybox source
repository. I'd inherited Erik Andersen's "hall of shame" and tried to
clean up the mess. Once I'd proved that enforcing the license did _not_
result in adding any useful code to the busybox source repository (a
dozen or so source tarballs had _nothing_ we wanted), I stopped doing
it. Unfortunately I couldn't get the other copyright holders to stop.)

I gave a whole talk about this in 2013:

Audio:
https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3

Outline: http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt

Alas, when I gave that talk I'd edited it down to about 3 hours of
material and had a 50 minute timeslot, which made less sense than it
should have without the web pages I was showing on the projector, and
the video cable kept falling out so there are numerous unexplained
pauses. I tried again at Texas LinuxFest but gave myself heatstroke the
day before the talk, and didn't really manage to do a _more_ coherent
version. I submitted the talk proposal to CELF again this year in hopes
I can do a more coherent version and maybe record the associated web
pages, a few of which are:

http://lu.is/blog/2013/01/27/taking-post-open-source-seriously-as-a-statement-about-copyright-law/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2611386/open-source-software/github-ceo-backs-mit-open-source-license.html
http://readwrite.com/2013/05/15/open-source-is-old-school-says-the-github-generation#awesm=~oDBVWaLSBrm6QD
http://efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=106357
http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/7/23/licensing/

Oh, and the wwiv stuff I mentioned near the start of the mp3 was at
http://landley.net/history/wwiv/

And the story of the squashfs guy spending _years_ trying to mainline
something every Linux distro was already using and still having to take
a year off to work on it full time (unpaid!) to finally get it in is
here: http://lwn.net/Articles/563578/

Kinda makes the "this code will go upstream due to license reasons"
argument seem immensely silly, doesn't it?

Oh, and one example of "obvious FUD against the concept public domain"
from what you'd think would be the _good_guys_ is:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225

And yes that's the lawyer for the Open Source Initiative comparing
public domain software to leaving trash by the side of the road. Why?
Because if it takes off he's out of a job, that's why. (As for his
"legal" argument, contract law and copyright law are distinct things, as
are patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, I wrote a week's worth of
columns about that 15 years ago, linked at the bottom of:

http://landley.net/writing/#iplaw

Sorry, as I said. 3 hours of material _after_ editing...

Rob
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