this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Programming

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It seems people have a hard time understanding the implications of licenses, so I have written a something to help with that.

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[–] JackbyDev 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Absolutely not! Avoid CC0! Stop spreading bad information. If you want a public domain dedication with fallback permissive license the best choice is (sadly) The Unlicense. It is the only public domain dedication with fallback permissive license approved by both FSF and OSI. It's unfortunate because The Unlicense is still a crayon license.

If you don't want to burden some stream projects with including copyright notices, just don't enforce it if you find people who forgot.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0

If you want to release your non-software work to the public domain, we recommend you use CC0. For works of software it is not recommended, as CC0 has a term expressly stating it does not grant you any patent licenses.

Because of this lack of patent grant, we encourage you to be careful about using software under this license; you should first consider whether the licensor might want to sue you for patent infringement. If the developer is refusing users patent licenses, the program is in effect a trap for users and users should avoid the program.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

"just don't enforce it" probably isn't enough for most companies and projects

[–] JackbyDev 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

If your company won't let you use MIT licensed software I don't know what to tell ya. If your company won't let you use MIT code, which FSF and OSI endorse, but will let you use CC0 code, which FSF and OSI do not endorse, then I really don't know what to tell ya.