Unlicense - One Year of Public Domain Code | Hacker News Reader

Unlicense - One Year of Public Domain Code

ar.to

31 pointsgregory8011 comments

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! :)

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?

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

I thought I had made it pretty clear what my estimate was based on (observing new projects pop up nearly daily over the course of the last year) and that it was merely my personal estimate, not some peer-reviewed fact as you are supposing.

I'm in the unique position to know the figures best, knowing roughly how many projects I haven't added to the project list at Unlicense.org. I have to say I'm at a loss to understand why you would think hundreds of projects implausible given that even simply googling for the uniquely-worded first line of the Unlicense returns 9,440 hits at present:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22This+is+free+and+unencumbe...

If we merely added the projects of the people listed at http://twitter.com/bendiken/unlicensed to the project list, the list would certainly already be at 100+ projects; this can be easily and quickly verified even just by eyeballing the GitHub, Bitbucket, Google Code, SourceForge, etc. accounts of the people involved. And those people are just a subset of all the developers currently using the Unlicense.

To put this in proper perspective, even I just by myself have more Unlicense-using projects hosted on GitHub than there are total projects listed on Unlicense.org. (I have tended to not add my projects to the list so as to make room for others.)

Even lacking other information than all the previous, it's hardly a stretch to estimate hundreds of projects. And, I of course actually have further information, having been uniquely positioned to observe this ecosystem grow during the last year.

I didn't keep notes on every new project, and have no intention of doing so in the future, as we who maintain Unlicense.org feel no need to grow the project list there to anything all that much longer than it already is (it clearly states "a sample", and is arguably already too long as it stands today; it needs curation for quality, not expansion for quantity).

As I said before, if we, or someone else, wished to provide a comprehensive catalogue of projects who've adopted the Unlicense, that would already at this point need to be a tagged/categorized database to be useful to anyone. By next year, that, too, probably couldn't keep up, so what's the point?

You continue to miss the point: it's not the responsibility of anyone else to back up what you're saying or to provide any substantiation for your claims.

None whatsoever.

Nor did I ever say I found it "implausible" that there were hundreds or thousands of projects using this license - that is your word. I just noted that you're pushing a movement and making a claim about its adoption without any clear basis for anyone else to believe it. I'm not a fan of blindly believing tossed-out claims. And no, when you throw around phrases like "I'm quite certain", you don't get to blow off skepticism with this isn't peer-reviewed!

"[H]aving semi-actively tracked the growth of adoption for the last year" doesn't mean much of anything - for all a random person knows, it could be a WAG on the lines of I saw 50 or 60 projects in the first month, so let's say ~700 projects by the end of the year.

It's great that you can point to much better evidence than that, in all seriousness. In the future, you might bring some of that up before getting defensive. I don't know you, and like many other people out there, I'd never heard of the Unlicense; you're not going to get blindly trusted.

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

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