That'd mean:
* OSI approves it
* FSF approves it
* Google and other companies with large stakes in FOSS find it acceptable
* Github + Gitlab support it in their templates
Can we have that?
The only differences:
- I didn’t use the “Copyright Boaty McBoatface 2022” line, but that’s not a big enough change to justify having two licenses.
- The license was approved as the FPL-1.0.0, which I believe was the first OSI-approved license that user semantic versioning. This isn’t necessary, but I was mildly excited about it.
- The 0BSD doesn’t actually inherit from any other BSD license, the “BSD” bit is more of a spiritual nod that I found more confusing than helpful.
Don't tell Rob Landley that (the creator of the license). He is quite adamant that he used a BSD license as the basis.
1. Let there be a file F. F is released to the public under 0BSD.
2. Let there be a project P. P includes code from F. The license notice of F is scrubbed as part of the inclusion process.
3. P is released as CC0.
The author of P cannot release the project as CC0 because the author has no right dedicate another person's code (F) to the public domain. Because 0BSD doesn't cause a public domain dedication in jurisdictions that accept doing so, F would have to continue being separate and explicitly exempt from the effects of CC0 to be an accurate of its usage terms. Effectively, this makes 0BSD be a de-facto attribution license in a CC0 project. In practice, it makes no difference, but it's legally deeply inelegant.
Github is the de-facto default sourcecode plattform. If it isn't a standard option on Github then it doesn't feel like a standard license.
There are really a lot of times that this is not important, or may be detrimental to your projects success.
There's a brief write-up here: https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model
All of us have direct experience with both OSI and FSF license processes. We have no desire to deal with them again. Even for a thoroughly noncontroversial permissive license.
I'm executive director of Blue Oak Council.
As a more casual person looking to use a license, this is basically the opposite of what I want to read.
As a non-lawyer, I have little chance of vetting a license myself. As a person with life experience, I have full appreciation for the delicacy of these kinds of licenses and legal issues.
If a license has consensus from OSI, FSF, Debian, maybe a FANG company or two, etc., then I have some trust that a kind of validation and peer review has occurred. I fear that using a license for which this has not occurred puts the users of my software at risk, or at least shifts the burden of future validation on to them.
TLDR: everybody knows what MIT, BSD, Apache, and the various GPL licenses imply. I think other bespoke licenses have a pretty high bar to clear before they become truly useful.
I put energy into cofounding Blue Oak Council to publish rigorous resources, like our permissive license list, https://blueoakcouncil.org/list, in large part out of disappointment and dread, pulling back the curtain on the institutional processes for license review. As lawyers, we need functional resources like that license list, to incorporate by reference into contracts and policies. Fundamentally political artifacts, like OSI or FSF or Debian whitelists, are type errors in those contexts.
> everybody knows what MIT, BSD, Apache, and the various GPL licenses imply
I'm afraid that's not true. I would say there is broad agreement on many of the core aspects. And in many situations, practically, the specific license terms don't matter nearly as much as widely help expectations. But key concepts affecting fairly common situations remain unclear, and those details come out when there's money or strategic leverage on the line. See, e.g. the list Heather Meeker keeps at https://heathermeeker.com/open-source-faq/what-are-the-most-... See also the whole debate on permissive licenses and standards-essential patents: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/10/03/Open-Standards.htm....
Any chance you could change the slug on that first link from Rely-on-OSI to Dont-Rely-on-OSI-Approval or similar? The current URL suggests the opposite of the article’s content. Hopefully adding a redirect isn’t too onerous.
> You must ensure that everyone who gets a copy of any part of this software from you, with or without changes, also gets the text of this license or a link to https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0.
To me this sounds like a viral public domain, so in a sense less permissive than MIT & co. If I modify the work but still have to put the text of this license when publishing it, the modified/derivative will be licensed under this license as well. Is this a fair assessment or am I missing something? I don't see how someone could take the work and use it in a proprietary software for example.
How does that follow? Compare:
MIT:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
BSD: > 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. > > 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
"Permission is hereby granted [to do so-and-so] subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
If you're shipping MIT-licensed software (or anything derived from MIT-licensed software) without also shipping a copy of the license, then you're not in compliance with the license.
A one-line sentence should be more than enough to clarify my intent.
The issue is that donating to the “public domain” isn’t a thing in many jurisdictions, so if you want a license that is effective everywhere then it needs to be wordy. If you are happy to retain copyright and other rights and simply want to grant other people a license to use you work then just use MIT.
> With regard to the transferability and the waiving of the copyright the German copyright law can be considered as one of the strictest systems in the world. Main reason is the strict monistic approach the German copyright law bases on. Key feature of this approach is the concept that, in principle, the copyright/author’s right itself can neither be transferred to another person nor waived by the author herself. The German author’s right consists of two parts, the moral rights and the exploitation rights. The moral rights are – as a rule – personal rights that are bound to the person of the creator (or, after her death, her legal heirs), i.e. they can neither be transferred nor waived. Since moral and exploitation rights are considered as inseparable parts of the author’s right as a whole (monistic approach) the exploitation rights cannot – in principle – transferred or waived by contract as well. However it is naturally possible to license the use of the work i.e. to transfer rights to use a protected work even on a large scale. Such licenses can practically lead (nearly) to the same result as an assignment or waiver of rights.
As for why: nobody considered that case when writing our copyright laws, and nobody bothered to change it. Copyright as designed can't be transferred (except through inheritance), to avoid exploitation of the original creator. As a consequence you can't really get rid of it, you can only grant licenses.
It's hardly the only right you can't get rid of, and CC0 tries to deal with some of them, like the right to one's one image which in the shortest possible form says that you can't create or publish a picture of a person without their consent (but as you can imagine is way more complicated than that). You could say that the German legal framework isn't about maximizing freedom, it's about maximizing happiness, and sometimes being able to give away a right or freedom will on balance cause more harm than good.
A workaround to the "concise" problem would be a commonly understood convention for indicating that a file is CC0 with a single line comment. The officially recommended boilerplate for CC0 is painfully cumbersome:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...
Something like this:
// Available under http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
I try to look this up and there isn't a concrete answer. There are countries with no or unclear Copyright terms, but I cant find countries with no public domain.
There are countries (eg. France) where moral rights are inalienable.
There are countries where you cannot put something into the public domain (Germany). Even countries where there isn't such a thing as the public domain.
You end up needing to write something which is clearly a license, yet acts like the work is in the public domain, and make it watertight (nearly) worldwide. So you end up with CC0.
Luckily you don't need to write anything very wordy to use CC0. It's actually pretty simple and short at your end. Creative Commons have already done the hard bit.
What's wrong with 0BSD?
https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD
"Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted."
Not being a lawyer I can only speculate on other problems. It doesn't get around the problem of moral rights, so probably doesn't work in France.
Except that's exactly (legally, anyways) sane in Europe (not EU, it predates EU). Read about moral rights, and you will learn the complexities of what the US squishes into a single copyright regime.
Note: moral rights was translated from French legal term droits moraux, there's no religious meaning in moral here.
This is up to debate. I am a european resident and I think it is insane, that the reason I am not free to donate my work into the public domain is supposed to be "moral rights".
Contract your lawmaker and have them define it legally. Its undefined because there isn't money to be gained by giving stuff away and for practical purposes current solutions seem to be work good enough for practical purposes for those who want to do so robs any such movement of much momentum thus far.
Of course they are. I am not free do do with my IP as I want. (gifting it to everyone). I have to keep ownership. (even though I reject the concept of IP alltogether)
But you are right with your explanation why it is like this. There is no money in it to change it for good and current solutions work "good enough" for practical purposes (giving everyone the right to use my IP).
So I will likely also just go on use the existing solutions, instead of running against walls and trying to change the laws.
A recipe for a cake is written on a paper and left on a bulletin board in town. It has no name and no one witnessed it being posted.
Everyone sees it and now knows how to make this cake.
The author may or may not be dead for 70 years.
Is it illegal to even document this cake recipe? You couldn't legally recount it in a news article or history text book without being able say who the author was and prove that they either granted a copy right or are known to be dead for 70 years?
Or worse, you are not only incentivised but essentially obligated to claim the authorship yourself just so you have someone to assign it to?
The thing undeniably exists regardless that the legal structure provides no place for it.
It's patently ridiculous. (guilty, terrible pun intended).
And there we come to the nuance of copyrights, at least in the US: you can't copy the text of the recipe, but the recipe itself don't have protection itself. Specifically, the text of the recipe is literature (which is protected), the recipe itself are instructions (which is not protected). This is the whole justification into clean-room design and reverse-engineering in software.
Also psuedonymous or even anonymous publications do have copyright (insert a legalheap of asterisks here). This actually sadly results into something called "orphan works", where they don't knew (or if they knew cannot find the next-of-kin/successor company/maybe even the government where the company was incorporated) where they can ask for permission.
(You can argue that there’s some legal risk at hand here; for example, if someone writes a book with the above and you start selling copies of it claiming you wrote it, the author can still come back and demand that you credit them as author and have that right enforced in court)
I think this is great. Case in point: blanket EULA for an image sharing site can not remove your right to be attributed, should your photo end up in an ad campaign or a newspaper. This means that many European newspapers actually make sure to not misattribute photographs, which has the side-effect of improving transparency in news reporting. So grabbing a photo online and wrongfully claiming it’s from the wrong time, place and source is not something that tends to happen in practice. And if it does, there’s a clear path to recourse that doesn’t require "lawyering up", you just file a claim with evidence.
2) Actually, SQLite has this: https://www.sqlite.org/purchase/license
I'm glad they offer the warranty of title and take money from companies with edgy lawyers, though. $6k is small as legal fees go. It's in general a lazy monetization strategy I broadly agree with and I've been hoping GitHub under MS's stewardship would help spearhead a simple way for people/companies to buy secondary-licensed copies of software without having to contact the author about it. (I think I got the idea from Zed Shaw around the time MS bought GH.) Like, a lot of software out there isn't a mess of contributors like the linux kernel each holding their own copyright, and thus much of it can be relicensed or dual-licensed without fuss. When people license something under the AGPL or even public domain if they're copying sqlite, sometimes they include something in the readme about being open to selling an alternatively licensed version/warranty of title to companies who have some issue. But even if they don't explicitly mention it, companies can still fruitfully contact such authors and make a deal. This happens all the time on twitter of all places, with journalists asking some user (who may not even be legally identifiable from just their handle) to re-use their apparently original photo or video. Sometimes the user just gives permission, sometimes they demand "pay me", sometimes a payment is actually made. Douglas Crockford has given permission (not sure if he got any money out of it) at least to IBM to use his software for evil, again showing his infamous clause is only a problem for people who decide to make it one.
Basically, I'd rather not tell people how they can license (or not license, as per public domain declarations) their code, and while it's fine to be aware of usability tradeoffs and it's fine to know that some edgy companies or users in other countries might write you off for your choice, it's important not to overstate the actual risks involved relative to the base rate risks already out there (like patent trolls) and it's important to recognize that solving the problems in ways even the edgiest of lawyers can be mostly happy with is often possible. Having blanket policies instead of pursuing those solutions is also a choice people are free to make.
(Writing this comment led me to https://web.archive.org/web/20120510151444/http://methodlogi... which is interesting in that it could suggest how further knowledge of tradeoffs and future pushback in the beginning may have led sqlite to be put under a license, however I don't suppose anything legally stops the authors agreeing to relicense in a new version since they retain a clean title, it's just there's no compelling practical reason like seeking more contributors.)
For one example, in Sweden you can never fully sign away the right to have creative work attributed to your name (until 50/70 years after creation/creator death, depending on nature of the work) as a creator. You can make a pinky promise to not claim that right, but you can’t fully waive it so you could always have a change of heart and demand to be credited by name later. IIRC this came from a notion of protecting artists and photographers from predatory contracts from the print industry or something similar.
Commercial rights etc can all be fully transferred, of course.
Plus since everything is served over the internet these days unless a license includes AGPL-type clauses the alike requirement will not attach.