Re: Local community license issue
On Sun, Jan 8, 2012, at 06:10 PM, Charles Plessy wrote:
> if you and the other contributors are not worried that your works
> will be used in proprietary derivatives, it may be most simple to
> take extremely liberal licenses, like the Unlicense, or to explore
> the way the Translation Project does, that is to promise to not
> exert copyrights.
>
> http://unlicense.org/
>
> http://translationproject.org/html/whydisclaim.html
Charles,
I think if you're looking for a public domain statement for the
Translation Project, I'd use the C0 instead of Unlicense. The
C0 license is endorsed by the FSF and will likely be listed as
a valid open source license by the OSI. By contrast, the Unlicense
is viewed by some legal professionals as being quite problematic.
There was a brief mention of Unlicense on the OSI's license-review
list this past week, here's a quote from Rick Moen:
| I hadn't seen Unlicense before now, but my immediate impression is
that
| it's not well formed and should be avoided.
|
| Its first sentence professes to put the covered work into the public
| domain. However, then the second sentence professes to grant reserved
| rights under copyright law. However, who is granting those rights,
the
| erstwhile copyright holder who, one sentence earlier, professed to
| destroy his or her own title?
|
| By contrast, CC0 states explicitly that the current copyright holder
| is attempting (I paraphrase) to the extent permitted by local law to
| disavow in perpetuity and on behalf of all successors all reserved
| rights, and _if that is locally unsuccessful_ grants a permissive
| license under his/her powers as copyright owner.
|
| I realize there are a whole lot of software engineers out there who'd
| like to handwave copyright law out of their lives (including you), but
| it'd be really nice if they'd occasionally bother to consult suitable
| legal help before shooting themselves and others in the foot.
If you're interested in more, here is a followup message.
http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/000052.html
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