Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmobit | Hacker News Reader

Saying the GPL is draconian and limits freedom is like saying the 13th amendment limits freedom since it takes away your right to own slaves.

View on HN

That rhetorical stance you take is particularly irksome when someone is talking about giving away their own code. He isn't whining that library X isn't under the GPL/LGPL. He's saying that'd he'd rather just give away his code entirely with no legal strings attached whatsoever.

Such is impossible under current copyright law

Could you be more precise? Are you repeating the "it's impossible to voluntarily place a work in the public domain" canard? There are well-established precedents in the US and Europe for authors waiving copyright. See djb's FAQ: http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html. If you are really paranoid and want a wordy license written in legalese to the same effect, you could use CC0. There's a detailed FAQ here: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ. There's also the Unlicense patterned on SQLite's public domain declaration: http://ar.to/2010/01/dissecting-the-unlicense.

In short, if you agree with the philosophical and practical advantages of releasing your code into the public domain, there is no excuse not do so under the guise of legal FUD.

The 13th amendment establishes the right of the state to own slaves.

Technically, according to the text of the 13th amendment, it formally and legally establishes as a constitutional right of the state to declare people slaves as "punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", which has of course resulted in prison chain gangs and various corporations hiring prisoners for cheap compliant slave labor over the years, and in the demand for such slave labor and thus the motivation of the state to imprison as many people as possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com