
Unlicense - One Year of Public Domain Code - gregory80
http://ar.to/2011/01/unlicense-1st-year
======
WimLeers
I'm trying to use the Unlicense whenever I can. I'm even retroactively
licensing past open source projects (and many projects I did as part of
university classes), to encourage reuse as much as possible.

My sincere thanks to those who worked hard on the Unlicense! :)

------
thurn
What's the story on using the Unlicense with libraries under other licenses?
I'd love to use it, but I depend on libraries that are under Apache and LGPL
licenses. Is it compatible?

~~~
arto
You can freely incorporate public domain code into a code base licensed under
any license whatsoever. For example, as the FSF states in
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html>, "Public domain material is
compatible with the GNU GPL."

For the other direction, that is, incorporating some copyrighted code into an
otherwise copyright-free code base, just be careful to keep the copyrighted
files isolated and clearly marked as encumbered, so that nobody accidentally
copies anything from them into the unencumbered portions of the code base. See
[http://groups.google.com/group/unlicense/browse_thread/threa...](http://groups.google.com/group/unlicense/browse_thread/thread/2b6daab51dbef77e)
for more information.

------
lawfulfalafel
I really wish there was a license that forced developers after a certain
amount of profit/time they would make their code open source. I would buy a
lot more software if I knew I was supporting something that is useful and
would soon be free for all. That sort of license could be really beneficial
for developers who want to work on small open source projects full time.

------
gregory80
kinda cool to see creative commons has recognized unlicense as a legitimate
alternative for dedicating code to the public domain.

------
Semiapies
_"The best estimate I can give, from having semi-actively tracked the growth
of adoption for the last year, is that there must at the very least now be
many hundreds of projects using the Unlicense. I doubt we have yet crossed the
1,000-project mark, but I'm quite certain that in another year's time we will
have."_

Someone should make a list of them (that goes beyond 50 projects). Without
some sort of substantiation, there's no real reason to believe this claim.

~~~
arto
If you think it that important, feel free to improve upon the list; it's
maintained at <https://github.com/bendiken/unlicense.org>. Fork the
repository, update the list, and submit a pull request to merge. Easy as pie.

Given that the list at Unlicense.org doesn't even include all of my own
projects, it's really not comprehensive at all. So, here's a tip: just set a
couple of Google Alerts (in addition to the obvious "Unlicense", searching
also for the first line of text from the Unlicense is particularly effective).
Much easier.

Note also that there isn't much point listing hundreds of projects directly on
the front page of Unlicense.org. If we wanted to actually be comprehensive, we
should do something like a tagged and searchable database of projects. This
has been discussed previously, but isn't a priority.

~~~
Semiapies
I'm not in your "movement" - it's not _my_ responsibility to provide the
evidence just because I'm the first person to bother saying _citation needed_
on a broad, unsubstantiated claim like that.

~~~
arto
I thought I had made it pretty clear what my estimate was based on (observing
new projects pop up nearly daily over the course of the last year) and that it
_was_ merely my personal estimate, not some peer-reviewed fact as you are
supposing.

I'm in the unique position to know the figures best, knowing roughly how many
projects I _haven't_ added to the project list at Unlicense.org. I have to say
I'm at a loss to understand why you would think hundreds of projects
implausible given that even simply googling for the uniquely-worded first line
of the Unlicense returns 9,440 hits at present:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=%22This+is+free+and+unencumbe...](http://www.google.com/search?q=%22This+is+free+and+unencumbered+software+released+into+the+public+domain%22&filter=0)

If we merely added the projects of the people listed at
<http://twitter.com/bendiken/unlicensed> to the project list, the list would
certainly already be at 100+ projects; this can be easily and quickly verified
even just by eyeballing the GitHub, Bitbucket, Google Code, SourceForge, etc.
accounts of the people involved. And those people are just a subset of all the
developers currently using the Unlicense.

To put this in proper perspective, even I just by myself have more Unlicense-
using projects hosted on GitHub than there are total projects listed on
Unlicense.org. (I have tended to not add my projects to the list so as to make
room for others.)

Even lacking other information than all the previous, it's hardly a stretch to
estimate hundreds of projects. And, _I_ of course actually _have_ further
information, having been uniquely positioned to observe this ecosystem grow
during the last year.

I didn't keep notes on every new project, and have no intention of doing so in
the future, as we who maintain Unlicense.org feel no need to grow the project
list there to anything all that much longer than it already is (it clearly
states "a sample", and is arguably already too long as it stands today; it
needs curation for quality, not expansion for quantity).

As I said before, if we, or someone else, wished to provide a comprehensive
catalogue of projects who've adopted the Unlicense, that would already at this
point need to be a tagged/categorized database to be useful to anyone. By next
year, that, too, probably couldn't keep up, so what's the point?

~~~
Semiapies
You continue to miss the point: it's not the responsibility of anyone else to
back up what you're saying or to provide any substantiation for your claims.

None whatsoever.

Nor did I ever say I found it "implausible" that there were hundreds or
thousands of projects using this license - that is _your_ word. I just noted
that you're pushing a movement and making a claim about its adoption without
any clear basis for anyone else to believe it. I'm not a fan of blindly
believing tossed-out claims. And no, when you throw around phrases like "I'm
quite certain", you don't get to blow off skepticism with _this isn't peer-
reviewed!_

"[H]aving semi-actively tracked the growth of adoption for the last year"
doesn't mean much of anything - for all a random person knows, it could be a
WAG on the lines of _I saw 50 or 60 projects in the first month, so let's say
~700 projects by the end of the year_.

It's great that you _can_ point to much better evidence than that, in all
seriousness. In the future, you might bring some of that up before getting
defensive. _I don't know you_ , and like many other people out there, I'd
never heard of the Unlicense; you're not going to get blindly trusted.

------
webr3
great work, unlicense is my go-to license for all projects!

