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Comment by sidpatil | Hacker News Reader

This line confused me for a while, because it looked like a copyleft provision to me.

It's not copy left, but users have the right to see the license "tree" if you will of all the things you've built your code with.

I think, as others have pointed out in the replies, 0BSD or MIT-0 is more suitable for me.

> I think, as others have pointed out in the replies, 0BSD or MIT-0 is more suitable for me.

Why not go with [CC0] in that case? It's a lot more robust, and recommended by the FSF over options like the Unlicense.

[CC0] https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Note that the OSI does not recommend CC0 however because of its patent language. [1] The OSI didn't reject it but the license was withdrawn after it was presumably clear that it would not be approved.

[1] https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero

I can't imagine using CC0 under any circumstances. If you're in the U.S., commit to public domain. If you aren't, then veering way off into contract law instead of copyright law is distinctly unhelpful. There isn't a Berne Convention to cross-level contract law.

One of the main reasons why I find the CC0 attractive is that it can be used, and is widely used, for works other than software. As a result, it seems to have better name recognition, especially outside of programmer circles, and it's nice to be able to use a single legal text for software that also contains images, audio, or similar assets. (Slapping software licenses onto media files impedes their re-use outside the context of that particular software project.)

Is there an alternative you'd recommend?

Where is the FSF recommendation? And did they only consider unlicense?

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0

Is requiring attribution copyleft? I thought copyleft implied needing to make source code available.

Just needing attribution is not copyleft, you are giving credit to the original author. Share-Alike or using the same license to make source code available like GPL is copyleft.

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