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Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free

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Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free Like 232 Follow on Tumblr 138 What is the Unlicense? The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful public domain SQLite project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used MIT/X11 license. Why Use the Unlicense? Because you have more important things to do than enriching lawyers or imposing petty restrictions on users of your code. How often have you passed up on utilizing and contributing to a great software library just because its open source license was not compatible with your own preferred flavor of open source? How many precious hours of your life have you spent deliberating how to license your software or worrying about licensing compatibility with other software? You will never get those hours back, but here's your chance to start cutting your losses. Life's too short, let's get back to coding. The Unlicense To opt out of the copyright industry's game altogether and set your code free, put your next software project into the public domain using the following (un)licensing statement: This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means. In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. For more information, please refer to <http://unlicense.org/> In a saner world, you would only need the first one or two paragraphs. For the time being you'll probably want to retain the whole shebang. (You should feel free, though, to leave out the last line containing the link to this site, if that's your preference.) You would traditionally put the above statement into a file named COPYING or LICENSE. However, to explicitly distance yourself from the whole concept of copyright licensing, we recommend that you put your unlicensing statement in a file named UNLICENSE. Doing so also means that your project can more easily be found on e.g. GitHub or Bitbucket, enabling others to reuse your code in their own unencumbered public domain projects. For a comprehensive listing of software using the Unlicense, google for the first line of the Unlicense. It was purposely worded uniquely, which means that all the returned search results are likely to relate to the Unlicense in some way. Unlicensing Contributions In order to ensure your project remains completely free and unencumbered by anyone's copyright monopoly, it is advisable that you ask any major contributors to explicitly dedicate their code-base contributions to the public domain. This removes any possible ambiguity as to what terms somebody might have thought they were contributing under, in case of a future dispute. These concerns are not unique to public domain software. Most large, established open-source projects have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) process, of varying degrees of formality. At minimum, you might ask your contributors to accompany any non-trivial patches with a simple statement like the following: I dedicate any and all copyright interest in this software to the public domain. I make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of my heirs and successors. I intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law. Better yet is to ask the major contributors to digitally sign a more explicit copyright release (see an example WAIVER file), and then to keep a record of such signatures in an AUTHORS file accompanying your software. Using GnuPG, contributors can sign a copyright waiver file as follows: $ gpg --no-version --armor --sign WAIVER Note that if a contributor makes significant changes or enhancements in his capacity as an employee of some formal organization, then the above may be insufficient and you would additionally need to ask for a copyright disclaimer signed by a company officer. For more information, have a look at how the SQLite project handles this. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) also provides an example of a simple copyright disclaimer to be signed by an employer. For a concrete example of this contributor process, see how the unlicensed RDF.rb project has handled this. Unlicensed Free Software Here follows a sample of some of the software projects that have already adopted the Unlicense or a derivative thereof: Bitcoin.php, a PHP library (and plugins for WP e-Commerce, Ubercart, and VirtueMart) for the Bitcoin peer-to- peer digital currency system. Bitcoin::OTC, a Ruby client for fetching ratings data from the #bitcoin-otc trading database. CRM114.rb, a Ruby interface to the CRM114 Controllable Regex Mutilator. CryptLib, a cryptographic library for C that implements the MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, and RC4 algorithms. CSS3 Buttons, a simple CSS framework for creating good-looking GitHub style button links. Dagny, a Django adaptation of Ruby on Rails's Resource-Oriented Architecture. Distance, a CoffeeScript and JavaScript module for calculating Levenshtein/Sift3 distances between strings. Dux, a simple code editor for Mac OS X. EagleClaw, a Ruby library for building screen scrapers. Epoch, a lightweight init daemon for Linux systems. Fancypants, a JavaScript and Python library of data visualisation trinkets. fastFrag, a simple JSON-based client-side JavaScript templating engine. ficly, writes like, a Google Chrome extension for analyzing ficly.com stories using the iwl.me service. FlexNav, a jQuery plugin for responsive menus, enabling a device-agnostic approach to complex site navigation. GrowlAMQP, a Ruby daemon that reports AMQP messages via Growl. Habilis, an email-to-Dropbox gateway. HTTPkit, a Ruby toolkit for building HTTP clients and servers. Have-a-Cookie, a Google Chrome extension for enhanced-privacy cookie management. I2P.rb, a Ruby library for interacting with the I2P anonymity network. JavaScript Object Graph, a Java library designed to make working with JSON simple. jQuery JSON-RPC, a JavaScript JSON-RPC library for jQuery. JSched, a simple Java framework for coroutines. jStorage, a cross-browser key-value store database to store data locally in the browser. Kakoune, an experimental text editor heavily inspired by Vim. lein-cucumber, a simple Leiningen plugin for running Clojure-based Cucumber-JVM specifications. libcpr, a backport of the core data structures and algorithms from the C++11 standard library to C. loopozorg, Python infrastructure for executing shell commands on file modification. Mailr, a Ruby on Rails-based webmail application. Machinery, a C library for dynamic x86 and MIPS code generation. Markdoc, a Python-based lightweight Markdown-based wiki system. MathIsFun2, a simple iPhone game. miniz.c, a single-source-file, high-performance deflate/inflate compression library with a zlib-compatible API. Nano, a nano-sized PHP framework. Nightweb, an anonymous P2P social network for Android smartphones and PCs. netscan, a C-based set of low-level network utilities. Nobox, a minimalist stacking window manager written in C using XCB. node-rdf, an ECMAScript/Node.js library for handling RDF data. Nuush, a Bash-based command-line RSS feed reader. OpenPGP.rb, a Ruby implementation of the OpenPGP Message Format (RFC 4880). pdiffer, a Python interface to the PerceptualDiff tool. PHP.rb, a Ruby-to-PHP code generator. PicoSpeaker, an interface to the SVOX Pico text-to-speech system. Pondasee, a frontend web developer starter kit using SCSS and Compass. Poolboy, a hunky Erlang worker pool factory. Prosper, a PHP 5.3 database abstraction layer library. Proto, a front-end web prototyping tool. Pure CSS widgets, including a 3D bar graph, jigsaw puzzle piece, and others. Puzzle Code, a game that teaches computer programming just by playing the game. pyFaceGraph, a Python client library for Facebook's Open Graph Protocol. Qataki, a command-line Identi.ca/StatusNet/Twitter client. Rack::Throttle, Rack middleware for rate-limiting incoming HTTP requests. RDF.rb, a Ruby library for working with Resource Description Framework (RDF) data. RDFI.js, a JavaScript implementation of the core RDF Interfaces Specification. RSA.rb, a Ruby implementation of the RSA encryption algorithm and the PKCS#1 cryptography standard. tkpip, a tool for installing and managing Python packages based on Tk. tkrequest, a tool for sending and receiving HTTP requests based on Tk. Tor.rb, a Ruby library for interacting with the Tor anonymity network. Tubras, a C++/Lua game engine. Tween-o-Matic, a Mac OS X application for designing CAMediaTimingFunction animation curves. Sidenote, a new document format optimized for reading & writing skimmable documents. Spira, a Linked Data ORM for Ruby. stacktrace.js, a framework-agnostic JavaScript micro-library for getting stack traces in all web browsers.
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