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Comment by rdpintqogeogsaa | Hacker News Reader

I observe some confused comments on this page that seem to argue that the MIT license doesn't come with a requirement to keep the copyright line intact (which is demonstrably false, you don't get two paragraphs into the license without finding the attribution requirement).

The part that caught my interest is: How many people consciously picked the MIT license when they actually meant a non-attribution license?

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I think most people explicitly choose MIT for this. It's a very very free license, allowing you to do pretty much anything you want with the code. Among the opensource developers I know the one thing they consistently care about is attribution for the work they've done for free.

I like your last question. Can you give an example of a "non-attribution license"?

If you're attached to your copyright: 0-clause BSD is a thing that exists[0]. Toybox uses it.

If you want to throw your copyright out the window: The commonly accepted solution seems to be CC-0[1], which tries very hard to disclaim rights and limit liability in as many jurisdictions as possible, complete with a fallback license grant for failed public domain dedications. Because CC-0 makes some people uncomfortable despite the lengths it goes to reach its goals, some projects work with dual-licensing to cover the other side, such as Monocypher.

Neither of them address patents. If patents are something you want to/need to address, you could perhaps paste the patent clause from BSD-2-Clause-Patent onto 0-clause BSD.