[License-review] Request for legacy approval: The Unlicense

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 1:02 PM Brendan Hickey
<brendan.m.hickey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Unlicense should not be approved under any circumstance, regardless of popularity.  The public domain dedication simply doesn't work. Some countries outside of the US (Germany?) don't recognize these grants. CC0 anticipates jurisdictional issues and contains a fallback grant of rights. Without this, no one can actually rely on Unlicense.
>
> I wish this wasn't the case, but Unlicense is a great example of why we should listen to specialist attorneys on licensing matters.

I'm going to take out my "specialist attorney on licensing matters"
card (as much as it pains me to do so) and say I support granting
legacy approval for the Unlicense. I wouldn't necessarily support
approval for the regular (non-legacy) category, which arguably entails
a more stringent form of review based on various criteria. The wide
use of the Unlicense, and the full consistency of its terms with the
OSD and traditional understandings of software freedom (the latter
encompassed all sorts of more rudimentary and informal public domain
dedication language, appearing throughout present-day corpora
recognized by just about everyone as open source, it should be noted)
ought to be enough.

Richard


>
> Brendan
>
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 12:42 PM <osi-license-review at jaeckel.eu> wrote:
>>
>> The license
>> ===========
>>
>> This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.
>>
>> Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or
>> distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled
>> binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any
>> means.
>>
>> In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors
>> of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the
>> software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit
>> of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and
>> successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of
>> relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this
>> software under copyright law.
>>
>> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
>> EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
>> MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
>> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR
>> OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
>> ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
>> OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
>>
>> For more information, please refer to <http://unlicense.org/>
>>
>> The rationale
>> =============
>>
>> The Unlicense exists since 10 years [1] to give projects the possibility
>> to dedicate their code into the public domain in jurisdictions that
>> don't have an understanding of the public domain. The homepage at
>> https://unlicense.org/ lists a wide variety of software that already
>> uses said license. A search on GitHub for projects using The Unlicense
>> [2] returns by the time of writing 133,188 repositories using it (not
>> including forks of repositories).
>>
>> Proliferation category
>> ======================
>>
>> Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities
>>
>> Reasoning for this category
>> ---------------------------
>>
>> e.g. the EPL1.0 and EPL2.0 licenses together don't have half of the
>> number of repositories (38,117 [3] resp. 12,509 [4]) and they fall as
>> well under this category.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you for your work and considering the approval of The Unlicense to
>> the wide and well-chosen variety of Open Source Licenses.
>>
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Steffen Jaeckel
>>
>>
>> [1] https://ar.to/2010/01/set-your-code-free
>> [2]
>> https://github.com/search?q=license%3Aunlicense&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch&l=&l=
>> [3]
>> https://github.com/search?q=license%3Aepl-1.0&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch&l=&l=
>> [4]
>> https://github.com/search?q=license%3Aepl-2.0&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch&l=&l=
>>
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>
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