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49 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
49 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
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My collected rationales for placing these libraries
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in the public domain:
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1. Public domain vs. viral licenses
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Why is this library public domain?
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Because more people will use it. Because it's not viral, people are
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not obligated to give back, so you could argue that it hurts the
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development of it, and then because it doesn't develop as well it's
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not as good, and then because it's not as good, in the long run
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maybe fewer people will use it. I have total respect for that
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opinion, but I just don't believe it myself for most software.
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2. Public domain vs. attribution-required licenses
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The primary difference between public domain and, say, a Creative Commons
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commercial / non-share-alike / attribution license is solely the
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requirement for attribution. (Similarly the BSD license and such.)
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While I would *appreciate* acknowledgement and attribution, I believe
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that it is foolish to place a legal encumberment (i.e. a license) on
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the software *solely* to get attribution.
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In other words, I'm arguing that PD is superior to the BSD license and
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the Creative Commons 'Attribution' license. If the license offers
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anything besides attribution -- as does, e.g., CC NonCommercial-ShareAlike,
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or the GPL -- that's a separate discussion.
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3. Other aspects of BSD-style licenses besides attribution
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Permissive licenses like zlib and BSD license are perfectly reasonable
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in their requirements, but they are very wordy and
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have only two benefits over public domain: legally-mandated
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attribution and liability-control. I do not believe these
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are worth the excessive verbosity and user-unfriendliness
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these licenses induce, especially in the single-file
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case where those licenses tend to be at the top of
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the file, the first thing you see.
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To the specific points, I have had no trouble receiving
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attribution for my libraries; liability in the face of
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no explicit disclaimer of liability is an open question,
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but one I have a lot of difficulty imagining there being
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any actual doubt about in court. Sometimes I explicitly
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note in my libraries that I make no guarantees about them
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being fit for purpose, but it's pretty absurd to do this;
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as a whole, it comes across as "here is a library to decode
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vorbis audio files, but it may not actually work and if
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you have problems it's not my fault, but also please
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report bugs so I can fix them".
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