Hg64: A 64-bit histogram data structure
dotat.at
dotat.at
Do not use this bone-headed license.
The Fedora people have identified a problem with it.
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@lists.fe...
TL; DR: the CC0 license explicitly says that it's granting only use and redistribution in a copyright sense, and not granting any patent or trademark rights.
This is different from a truly free license like BSD or MIT which grant unlimited redistribution and use.
I don't think you can say that here.
"This is public domain" is better than CC0 in jurisdictions where "this is public domain" is meaningful. Particularly if accompanied by a statement indicating that users are free to reproduce, broadcast and use the work in any manner. The problem is that work can be assigned to the public domain at the copyright level, without users having the license to use its patents and trademarks.
CC0 is better than "this is public domain" in jurisdictions where the latter is invalid, because its fallback license is better than none at all.
As a separate topic, the CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode) is idiotically verbose. The BSD license is small enough that I can put it into every source file. That makes it easy for people to borrow pieces of a program.
Not "unlimited"; they do require a copyright notice. An interesting license for small pieces of code like this is 0BSD[1], it is (despite the name) a small modification of the ISC license[2] that drops the requirement to include the copyright notice. The advantage being for small pieces of code it means you don't have the proliferation of copyright lines that in theory should be copied even into binary distributions of the code.
[1]: https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html [2]: Compare 0BSD with: https://spdx.org/licenses/ISC.html
Or else, what exactly is the use case?
With 0BSD there's no need to remove the copyright notice, but there's no need to proliferate the text.
As mentioned in https://landley.net/toybox/license.html the result of correctly complying with this can be crazy things like: https://github.com/android/platform_system_core/blob/fd4c6b0...
The advantage of 0BSD is it appears to be the most accepted OSI license without the attribution requirement (given as you mention CC0 isn't accepted by Fedora, Unlicense isn't allowed by Google). Usual not being a lawyer applies, this is just my observations.
There is no need to have two copies of a license which differ only in this:
Copyright (c) 1987, 1993
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1987, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Secondly, it's obvious that what that file consists of is licenses pulled from individual source files. But doesn't indicate which source files. It mentions various author names, but doesn't say who wrote which file.
This conglomerated file is uninformative and serves no purpose.
What you want is to just leave the original notices in the source files and have a concise summary about what.
This project uses:
* BSD-licensed code by Jeffrey Mogul in subdir/foo;
* BSD-licensed code by David Hitz in subdir/bar;
...
consult the individual license headers or subdirectory LICENSE files for the exact licensing details.> 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.
You do need to pull out the license headers into somewhere to present to the end user, for binary distributions.
Also the Apache license explicitly mentions a file called "NOTICE", which, again, I'm not a lawyer, but I believe is how the Apache license and some BSD licenses are able to be compatible here. Your proposed summary therefore doesn't make the licenses compatible.
Hence 0BSD is a way to not further contribute to this problem.
Just, do whatever is most convenient for you.
I started using CC0 more than 10 years ago, I think, and at that time the problems with its patent clause were not so well known. I personally only properly understood after Red Hat’s recent decision, after I wrote hg64.