Public domain equivalent license

Public domain equivalent license are licenses (or waivers) that grant public-domain-like rights and create public domain software.

Licenses

While real public domain makes licenses (for instance software licenses) unnecessary, as no owner/author is required to grant permission, there are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights. While there is no universally agreed-upon license, several licenses aim to release source code into the public domain.

WTFPL license logo, a public-domain-like license
CC0 license logo, a copyright waiver and public-domain-like license[1]

In 2000 the WTFPL was released as public-domain-like license/waiver/anti-copyright notice especially for software.[2] In 2016, according to Black Duck Software,[3] 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. 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 the Creative Commons CC0 as a recommended license to dedicate content and software to the public domain.[8][9] In June 2016 an analysis of the Fedora Project's software packages revealed the CC0 as the seventeenth most popular license.[10]

The Unlicense, published around 2010, has a focus on an anti-copyright message. The Unlicense offers a public-domain waiver text with a fall-back public-domain-like license, inspired by permissive licenses but without an attribution clause.[11][12] In 2015 Github reported that approximately 102,000 of their 5.1 million licensed projects, or 2%, use the Unlicense.[13]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Downloads". Creative Commons. 2015-12-16. Retrieved 2015-12-24.
  2. ↑ Version 1.0 license on anonscm.debian.org.
  3. ↑ "Top 20 licenses". Black Duck Software. 31 May 2016. Retrieved 31 May 2016. 1 MIT License 26% 2 GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0 21% 3 Apache License 2.0 16% 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
  4. ↑ https://creativecommons.org/weblog/2009/03/11/13304
  5. ↑ 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 by Dr. Till Kreutzer, attorney-at-law in Berlin, Germany.
  6. ↑ "Using CC0 for public domain software". Creative Commons. April 15, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2011.
  7. ↑ "Various Licenses and Comments about Them". GNU Project. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
  8. ↑ licenses on opendefinition.com
  9. ↑ Creative Commons 4.0 BY and BY-SA licenses approved conformant with the Open Definition by Timothy Vollmer on creativecommons.org (December 27th, 2013)
  10. ↑ Anwesha Das (22 June 2016). "Software Licenses in Fedora Ecosystem". anweshadas.in. Retrieved 2016-06-27. In the above bar-chart I have counted GPL and its different versions as one family, and I did the same with LGPL too. From this diagram it is very much clear that the MIT License is the most used license, with a total number of use case of 2706.Therefore comes GPL (i.e GNU General Public License) and its different versions, BSD, LGPL(i.e GNU Lesser General Public License) and its different versions, ASL (i.e Apache Software License) family, MPL (i.e Mozilla Public License). Apart from these licenses there are projects who has submitted themselves in to Public Domain and that number is 137.
  11. ↑ The Unlicense: A License for No License on ostatic.com by Joe Brockmeier (2010)
  12. ↑ The Unlicense on unlicense.org.
  13. ↑ Balter, Ben (2015-03-09). "Open source license usage on GitHub.com". github.com. Retrieved 2015-11-21. 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)
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/18/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.