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Comment by twhb | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but I would be very interested in somebody making a case for why an OS license is better than a simple line like "This code is free for everybody to use as they wish." I've read about it plenty, but remain unconvinced.

The OS software I write is for the good of everybody, not just its own popularity or the OS community. I'm fine with all uses of it, in whole or in part, whether or not I'm credited. The license reproduction requirement therefore feels like unnecessary noise, and I'd like to think that courts are sane enough that the warranty disclaimer is unnecessary too - is there any real court case where somebody has been sued for a defect in free, OS software, without an explicit warranty, and lost?

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One thing to consider is that some provisions (and overall clarity) protect users of your code. The best example is including patent grants in the license terms (like those in Apache v2 and GPLv3) that may not be covered in that one liner.

There's also provisions (or implications thereof) that can protect the community around your project, like how the Apache license includes a clause that specifies that contributions back to the project are assumed to be under the Apache license by default.

Not a lawyer, but I always thought maybe someone could take your code, modify it to produce variations A, B, C, the three major use cases of your code, and slap patents on those modified versions of your code. So then anyone who wants to use your code with any of those three use cases in mind (i.e., most people who would want to use your code) would then likely be in trouble.

Or something like that.

A second issue would be one the author of the article seems worried about, which is that without a warranty-free clause people might sue you for bugs in the code. If you're distributing your code, with a line like "free for everybody to use," there may or may not be implicit quality guarantees, according to the article.

Has any such lawsuit actually occurred?

Every company that releases free software has a legal department, and that legal department usually advises them to:

    1. Use a proper license (drafted by lawyers).
    2. Include the license information in every source file.
    3. Reference the license in the documentation / metadata.

Now, is this overly cautious? Maybe. But I think that following what an actual legal team's recommendation is is much more preferable to doing anything else.

Not to mention that company lawyers will be very worried about code under a license as brief as the one you wrote (especially since it was not written by a lawyer). So just use CC-0 or something and call it a day if you really don't care -- it is never a good idea to write your own license and it will actually result in less people using your code because they cannot be sure it would be interpreted as a free software license.

If you use an already established license people know what to expect and can easily reuse your work, do-it-yourself licenses frequently run into problems of being imprecise and needing further clarifications. A lot of jurisdictions also don't allow you to easily release something in the public domain, you automatically retain some rights even when you don't want them, the license has to explicitly state that you waive those rights.

See the explanation for CC0: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

I.e. because you are not a lawyer and you don't know how to write an open source license.

One obvious example is that your one-liner doesn't specify that your code has no warranty so someone can sue you if it doesn't work as advertised.

I'm not sure about the what advantages the MIT license has over your one-liner, but some people (eg Stallman) believe in using more restrictive mechanisms like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft, and your one-liner is inadequate for them

"This code is free for everybody to use as they wish", but it doesn't state that it is free to distribute, free to modify, free to sell copies, so I wouldn't consider this an open source license. I'm not a lawyer and already I've found holes.

It sounds like you want to place your code in the public domain rather than publishing it under a permissive copyright. Have you looked at the unlicense?

I have always wondered the same.

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