Public-domain-equivalent license

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WTFPL logo.svg
WTFPL license logo, a public-domain-like license
Cc-zero.svg
CC0 license logo, a copyright waiver and public-domain-like license [1]
PD-icon-black.svg
Unlicense logo, a copyright waiver and public-domain-like license

Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.

Contents

No permission or license is required for a work truly in the public domain, such as one with an expired copyright; such a work may be copied at will. Public domain equivalent licenses exist because some legal jurisdictions[ which? ] do not provide for authors to voluntarily place their work in the public domain, but do allow them to grant arbitrarily broad rights in the work to the public.

The licensing process also allows authors, particularly software authors, the opportunity to explicitly deny any implied warranty that might give someone a basis for legal action against them. While there is no universally agreed-upon license, several licenses aim to grant the same rights that would apply to a work in the public domain.

Licenses

In 2000, the "Do What the Fuck You Want To Public License" (WTFPL) was released as a public-domain-equivalent license for software. [2] It is distinguished among software licenses by its informal style and lack of a warranty disclaimer. In 2016, according to Black Duck Software, [note 1] the WTFPL was used by less than 1% of FOSS projects.

In 2009, Creative Commons released CC0, which was created for compatibility with jurisdictions where dedicating to public domain is problematic, such as continental Europe.[ citation needed ] This is achieved by a public-domain waiver statement and a fall-back all-permissive license, for cases where the waiver is not valid. [4] [5] The Free Software Foundation [6] [7] and the Open Knowledge Foundation approved CC0 as a recommended license to dedicate content to the public domain. [8] [9] The FSF and the Open Source Initiative, however, do not recommend the usage of this license for software due to inclusion of a clause expressly stating it does not grant patent licenses. [7] [10] In June 2016 an analysis of the Fedora Project's software packages placed CC0 as the 17th most popular license. [note 2]

The Unlicense software license, published around 2010, offers a public-domain waiver text with a fall-back public-domain-like license, inspired by permissive licenses but without an attribution clause. [12] [13] In 2015 GitHub reported that approximately 102,000 of their 5.1 million licensed projects, or 2%, use the Unlicense. [note 3]

The BSD Zero Clause License [15] removes half a sentence from the ISC license, leaving only an unconditional grant of rights and a warranty disclaimer. [16] It is listed by the Software Package Data Exchange as the Zero Clause BSD license, with the SPDX identifier 0BSD. [17] It was first used by Rob Landley in Toybox and is OSI-approved.

The MIT No Attribution License, a variation of the MIT License, was published in 2018 and has the identifier MIT-0 in the SPDX License List. [18]

Reception

In the free-software community, there has been some controversy over whether a public domain dedication constitutes a valid open-source license. In 2004, lawyer Lawrence Rosen argued in the essay "Why the public domain isn't a license" that software could not truly be given into public domain, [19] a position that faced opposition by Daniel J. Bernstein and others. [20] In 2012, Rosen changed his mind, accepted CC0 as an open-source license, and admitted that, contrary to his previous claims, copyright can be waived away. [21]

In 2011, the Free Software Foundation added CC0 to its free software licenses and called it "the preferred method of releasing software in the public domain" [22] [23]  – the Foundation then reviewed its position specifically for softwares.

In February 2012, when the CC0 license was submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval, [24] controversy arose over a clause which excluded any relevant patents held by the copyright holder from the scope of the license. This clause was added with scientific data in mind rather than software, but some members of the OSI believed it could weaken users' defenses against software patents. As a result, Creative Commons withdrew their submission, and the license is not currently approved by the OSI. [25] [10] In July 2022, the Fedora Project deprecated CC0 for software code for the same reasons, but will still allow its use for non-code content. [26]

In June 2020, following a request for legacy approval, OSI formally recognized the Unlicense as an approved license meeting the OSD. [27]

Google does not allow its employees to contribute to projects under public domain equivalent licenses like the Unlicense and CC0, while allowing contributions to 0BSD licensed and US government PD projects. [28]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 1. MIT License: 26%; 2. GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0: 21%; 3. Apache License 2.0: 16%; 4. GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0: 9%; 5. BSD License 2.0 (3-clause, New or Revised) License: 6%; 6. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1: 4%; 7. Artistic License (Perl): 4%; 8. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0: 2%; 9. ISC License: 2%; 10. Microsoft Public License: 2%; 11. Eclipse Public License (EPL): 2%; 12. Code Project Open License 1.02: 1%; 13. Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1: < 1%; 14. Simplified BSD License (BSD): < 1%; 15. Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL): < 1%; 16. GNU Affero General Public License v3 or later: < 1%; 17. Microsoft Reciprocal License: < 1%; 18. Sun GPL With Classpath Exception v2.0: < 1%; 19. DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE: < 1%; 20: CDDL-1.1: < 1% [3]
  2. ↑ There are total 19,221 approved packages in Fedora repository as found on 20.06.2016, among those 1124 were dead packages. […] From the above chart it is clear that the GPL family is the highest used (I had miscalculated it as MIT before).The other major licenses are MIT, BSD, the LGPL family, Artistic (for Perl packages), LPPL (foe texlive packages), ASL. Apart from these licenses there are projects who has submitted themselves in to Public Domain and that number is 517 and 11 packages have mentioned their license as Unlicense. [11]
  3. ↑ 1. MIT: 44.69%; 2. Other: 15.68%; 3. GPLv2: 12.96%; 4. Apache: 11.19%; 5. GPLv3: 8.88%; 6. BSD 3-clause: 4.53%; 7. Unlicense: 1.87%; 8. BSD 2-clause: 1.70%; 9. LGPLv3: 1.30%; 10. AGPLv3: 1.05% (30 mill * 2% * 17% = 102k) [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free software</span> Software licensed to be freely used, modified and distributed

Free software, libre software, or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source license</span> Software license allowing source code to be used, modified, and shared

Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose. They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These criteria are outlined in the Open Source Definition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apache License</span> Free software license

The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. The ASF and its projects release their software products under the Apache License. The license is also used by many non-ASF projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons license</span> Copyright license for free use of a work

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source code and object code forms, unless that software was developed by the United States Government, in which case it cannot be copyrighted. Authors of copyrighted software can donate their software to the public domain, in which case it is also not covered by copyright and, as a result, cannot be licensed.

A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.

Alternative terms for free software, such as open source, FOSS, and FLOSS, have been a controversial issue among free and open-source software users from the late 1990s onwards. These terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices.

This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public-domain software</span> Software in the public domain

Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, or sold even without any attribution by anyone; this is unlike the common case of software under exclusive copyright, where licenses grant limited usage rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WTFPL</span> Permissive free software license

The WTFPL is a permissive free software license. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The name is an abbreviation of Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.

License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem negatively by the burden of increasingly complex license selection, license interaction, and license compatibility considerations.

License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-software license</span> License allowing software modification and redistribution

A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses or copyleft that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.

A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual. Free licenses are often the basis of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding projects.

Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is an open standard for software bill of materials (SBOM). SPDX allows the expression of components, licenses, copyrights, security references and other metadata relating to software. Its original purpose was to improve license compliance, and has since been expanded to facilitate additional use-cases, such as supply-chain transparency and security. SPDX is authored by the community-driven SPDX Project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.

A public license or public copyright licenses is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unlicense</span> Anti-copyright license

The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license for software which provides a public domain waiver with a fall-back public-domain-like license, similar to the CC Zero for cultural works. It includes language used in earlier software projects and has a focus on an anti-copyright message.

References

  1. ↑ "Downloads". Creative Commons. 16 December 2015. Retrieved 2015-12-24.
  2. ↑ "Version 1.0 license". anonscm.debian.org. Archived from the original on 2013-06-02. Retrieved 2016-06-19.
  3. ↑ "Top 20 licenses". Black Duck Software. 31 May 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-07-19. Retrieved 2016-05-31.
  4. ↑ "11/17: Lulan Artisans Textile Competition". 18 June 2009.
  5. ↑ Till Kreutzer. "Validity of the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication and its usability for bibliographic metadata from the perspective of German Copyright Law" (PDF).
  6. ↑ "Using CC0 for public domain software". Creative Commons. 15 April 2011. Retrieved 2011-05-10.
  7. 1 2 "Various Licenses and Comments about Them". GNU Project . Retrieved 2015-04-04.
  8. ↑ "licenses". The Open Definition .
  9. ↑ Timothy Vollmer (27 December 2013). "Creative Commons 4.0 BY and BY-SA licenses approved conformant with the Open Definition". creativecommons.org.
  10. 1 2 The Open Source Initiative FAQ. "What about the Creative Commons "CC0" ("CC Zero") public domain dedication? Is that Open Source?". opensource.org. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  11. ↑ Anwesha Das (22 June 2016). "Software Licenses in Fedora Ecosystem". anweshadas.in. Retrieved 2016-06-27.
  12. ↑ Joe Brockmeier (2010). "The Unlicense: A License for No License". ostatic.com. Archived from the original on 2016-03-24.
  13. ↑ "The Unlicense". unlicense.org. Archived from the original on 2018-07-08. Retrieved 2020-05-12.
  14. ↑ Ben Balter (9 March 2015). "Open source license usage on GitHub.com". github.com . Retrieved 2015-11-21.
  15. ↑ "Zero-Clause BSD | Open Source Initiative". opensource.org. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  16. ↑ Toybox is released under the following "zero clause" BSD license by Rob Landley
  17. ↑ BSD Zero Clause License
  18. ↑ "MIT No Attribution". spdx.org. SPDX Working Group.
  19. ↑ Lawrence Rosen (2004-05-25). "Why the public domain isn't a license". rosenlaw.com. Retrieved 2016-02-22.
  20. ↑ Placing documents into the public domain by Daniel J. Bernstein on cr.yp.to: "Most rights can be voluntarily abandoned ('waived') by the owner of the rights. Legislators can go to extra effort to create rights that can't be abandoned, but usually they don't do this. In particular, you can voluntarily abandon your United States copyrights: 'It is well settled that rights gained under the Copyright Act may be abandoned. But abandonment of a right must be manifested by some overt act indicating an intention to abandon that right. See Hampton v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 279 F.2d 100, 104 (9th Cir. 1960).'" (2004).
  21. ↑ Lawrence Rosen (2012-03-08). "[License-review][License-discuss] CC0 incompliant with OSD on patents, (was: MXM compared to CC0)". opensource.org. Archived from the original on 2016-03-12. Retrieved 2016-02-22. The case you referenced in your email, Hampton v. Paramount Pictures, 279 F.2d 100 (9th Cir. Cal. 1960), stands for the proposition that, at least in the Ninth Circuit, a person can indeed abandon his copyrights (counter to what I wrote in my article) – but it takes the equivalent of a manifest license to do so. :-) [...] For the record, I have already voted +1 to approve the CC0 public domain dedication and fallback license as OSD compliant. I admit that I have argued for years against the "public domain" as an open source license, but in retrospect, considering the minimal risk to developers and users relying on such software and the evident popularity of that "license", I changed my mind. One can't stand in the way of a fire hose of free public domain software, even if it doesn't come with a better FOSS license that I trust more.
  22. ↑ "Using CC0 for public domain software". Creative Commons. April 15, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2011.
  23. ↑ "Various Licenses and Comments about Them". GNU Project . Retrieved April 4, 2015.
  24. ↑ Carl Boettiger. "OSI recognition for Creative Commons Zero License?". In the Open Source Initiative Licence review mailing list. opensource.org. Archived from the original on September 26, 2013. Retrieved February 1, 2012.
  25. ↑ Christopher Allan Webber. "CC withdrawl[sic] of CC0 from OSI process". In the Open Source Initiative Licence review mailing list. Archived from the original on 2015-09-06. Retrieved February 24, 2012.
  26. ↑ Francisco, Thomas Claburn in San. "Fedora sours on CC 'No Rights Reserved' license". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2022-07-26.
  27. ↑ Chestek, Pamela (June 16, 2020). "[License-review] Request for legacy approval: The Unlicense". Archived from the original on September 8, 2020.
  28. ↑ "Open Source Patching" . Retrieved 2020-09-29.
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