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Comment by Calms | Hacker News Reader

Great stuff.

Do you feel explicitly stating any licensing (or lack of) be a good idea for the samples?

I know you're asking the site creator, but I'd like to explore this matter for their benefit.

The code is hosted on GitHub which encourages authors to choose an open source license. I say "encourages" and not "requires" intentionally. See [1] for GitHub's take on it.

As an employee of a commercial software company, I'm willing to take others' advice with regard to best practices, security implications, code efficiency because I can't possibly be an expert in everything. Generally, I'll prefer someone else's solution over my own if it's well designed, documented, and simple. I'd love for the best solutions to each problem to propagate into everyone's code. But I must know the status of my ability to use your code - I must have a license. If there's no license, I simply can't use it. If there's a license, I can at least consider the code, and I can consider whether and how it affects the rest of my company's codebase.

1 - https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/#what...

While the question was aimed at the repo creator, I did intend on raising the question to incite further discussion since licensing concerns can be frequently forgotten - thank you for your insights!

I need to add a license to the samples repository (license suggestions welcome). The samples are all so short and generic that I'm not sure what legal significance it would actually have, but it's worth doing anyway if only to promote sharing and contributions.

You say "the samples are all so short" but there have been cases [+] where a very few lines were found by a court to infringe a copyright. Keep in mind that the heirs or purchasers of your copyrights might not be as benevolent as you.

As for suggestions, it depends entirely on your motives. The GPL would force users of your code to license their code under GPL also (if distributed to others.) An MIT or BSD license would only require attribution (a copyright notice) in the distribution. Personally? I'd prefer you went MIT or BSD.

+ - I've worked with former employees of companies where this kind of thing happened. I know this is vague and anecdotal, but I'll see what public information I can find just in case someone Really Must Know these cases

A public domain dedication, like that of SQLite, is the least restrictive and simplest option.

but has no legal value in France for example as you can't reject all your rights.

It has disputed legal effect in the US, too. But people (individuals and businesses) in practice don't seem to be concerned by it -- in either jurisdiction, or most others -- enough to not use software that is dedicated to the public domain like SQLite, so as a creator if your concern is signalling to people that it is okay to use it, a PD dedication seems likely to be clean.

And any license text is unlikely to have been vetted by lawyers familiar with the legal system of every foreign jurisdiction where it might be applied, so you probably have the same problem with them (and the more complex the terms are, the more likely that they have some unforeseen problem in an unconsidered jurisdiction.)

Is it possible to declare something public domain, and license it as a "fallback"?

That's the effect of the CC0 license: dedicate the work to the public domain, if that isn't possible give away as many rights as possible

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed

> The samples are all so short and generic that I'm not sure what legal significance it would actually have

People reading the page also will be "not sure", and that is a problem for them, because they need to be sure they can use the code.

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