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I have a question for the OP... Why the MIT licence, and not putting your code in the public domain? Is it the liability issues, or the attribution, or something else?

I mainly pose this question because I am choosing a licence for my projects, either the MIT/Apache licence, or public domain.




My understanding is that there are more legal gray areas with public domain than there are with even very permissive licenses (MIT, new-BSD, etc). I vaguely recall something about potential issues with public domain and other license incompatibilities, but I don't recall the specifics (and am certainly not a lawyer), so that probably isn't a useful datapoint.

Apache license has patent clauses that make it quite different than the new-BSD/MIT-style licenses.

In general, since I don't know a huge amount of the legal issues involved in public domain and national jurisdictions in regard to such, I simply err on the side of caution and choose MIT license for software I want to release as freely as possible. Others use it so it likely has more legal precedent and courtroom experience around it (should it ever come to that), and I like the notice of warranty disclaim (a bit of cya).


The copyright law differs between countries.

For example a piece of work that is not copyrightable in one country (even if it is the country of origin) may be copyrightable in another. Also in the US any work published before 1923 is in the public domain, however other countries are not bound by this year.

As far as this discussion is concerned, it is also debatable in some countries if the author is allowed to put his own work in public domain. Basically, there's no such thing as putting a work in the public domain, unless you don't mind limiting its usage (because if a piece of work is not accompanied by a license and is not in the public domain of the country you live in, you have no right to use it).

So if freedom is what you want, new-BSD or MIT are best. Plus, you keep getting the credit, which is nice.


There is forced attribution and the fact that in some countries putting work under the public domain doesn't mean you give up a lot of rights to it. You need to have a specifically liberal licence in order to do that.


This is probably a myth.

http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html


At least in Germany, as an artist, the only way to transfer your "Urheberrecht" to somebody else is to die. See §29 of the "Urheberrechtsgesetz" (copyright law) [1]:

"Das Urheberrecht ist nicht übertragbar, es sei denn, es wird in Erfüllung einer Verfügung von Todes wegen oder an Miterben im Wege der Erbauseinandersetzung übertragen."

(Translation: "Copyright is not transferable, unless it is transferred in execution of a testamentary disposition or to coheirs in the way of partition of an estate.")

[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/BJNR012730965.html#BJ...


From the article:

What is the One True License? I prefer the MIT license and almost everything we open source at GitHub carries this license. I love this license for several reasons:

It's short. Anyone can read this license and understand exactly what it means without wasting a bunch of money consulting high-octane lawyers.

Enough protection is offered to be relatively sure you won't sue me if something goes wrong when you use my code.

Everyone understands the legal implications of the MIT license. Weird licenses like the WTFPL and the Beer license pretend to be the "ultimate in free licenses" but utterly fail at this goal. These fringe licenses are too vague and unenforceable to be acceptable for use in some companies. On the other side, the GPL is too restrictive and dogmatic to be usable in many cases. I want everyone to benefit from my code. Everyone. That's what Open should mean, and that's what Free should mean.


Just a simple difference I know: Do you want to force users of your code to attribute the code to yourself? Then pick MIT/Apache


A much better reason is that you can't easily put things in the public domain and many countries don't recognize the public domain.


I'm no software license lawyer (and admittedly I haven't read Apache in depth), but I understand that the Apache license has at least one requirement I'm personally not too keen on.

4.2 in the license: "You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files", I'm not sure how "legal" it is to follow the convention of sticking a LICENSE file in the project root and have that assume to cover all contents therein, but that seems reasonable enough, versus 4.2.

I'd love to know further opinions on MIT vs. Apache.

[edit: engaged brain.]




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