LICENSE needs clarification

[necolas]

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225

Until those copyrights expire, no mechanism is in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain.

For these reasons, the “public domain” solution for free and open-source software is largely irrelevant.

Caveat emptor. Use the “Give-It-Away” license at your own risk. And don't accept gifts of software presuming they are in the public domain. If you want to give away software for any use whatsoever, use a simple license such as the MIT license.

The Creative Commons "Public Domain" license has also been retired.

Everyone would probably be better off with use of the MIT or Apache 2 license.

[addyosmani]

I would have thought that as this project is using http://unlicense.org/ (and not just claiming public domain) that it would be covered, but you have a point. Any reason not to go for the MIT over Apache 2?

[necolas]

The "unlicense" seems to be centred around the (apparently erroneous) idea that you can elect to put your work in the public domain.

[paulirish]

The CC0 "dedication" was designed to be the best possible "public domain" stand-in possible..

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ

[necolas]

I have concerns:

The CC0 doesn't appear to be a license at all, has limited jurisdiction, and is not recognised by the OSI.

The "Unlicense" doesn't seem particularly solid either. Website is dead at the moment and according to this thread

Unlicense will not be reviewed by the OSI because it is a "crayon"
licence (i.e. drafted by non legal professionals). Such licences have
been problematic in the past.

[randomecho]

Someone needs to go back in time to create this project at least 200 years ago and then die like Russell Nash and then you can see about getting it into the public domain.

[necolas]

Apparently, some companies require OSI-recognised licenses, which would mean that their developers couldn't technically use HTML5 Boilerplate (or even normalize.css). Potentially, we could use the MIT license.

(cc @seutje for an insight into Drupal licensing requirement insanity)

[roblarsen]

I like MIT because I don't think I'm missing something when I read it.

It's also right across the river and I'm a total local fanboy.

[addyosmani]

@necolas Is there a reason MIT wasn't used originally?

[paulirish]

@necolas Is there a reason MIT wasn't used originally?

Basically I didn't go with an attribution-based license because a lot of the techniques in H5BP are from all over; the community wrote it and it was assembled by the h5bp dev team. So I didn't want to require attribution to folks that arent neccessarily the authors.

Also publicdomain/unlicense/cc0 just seemed like a nicer "don't even ask, just take and use" license.

But seems like now those justifications are less valuable. Fine with me.

[artob]

For the record, it should be noted that Lawrence Rosen, author of the quoted 2002 article and former general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), last year recanted his previous views on public domain software:

I have already voted +1 to approve the CC0 public domain dedication and fallback license as OSD compliant. I admit that I have argued for years against the "public domain" as an open source license, but in retrospect, considering the minimal risk to developers and users relying on such software and the evident popularity of that "license", I changed my mind. One can't stand in the way of a fire hose of free public domain software, even if it doesn't come with a better FOSS license that I trust more.

See D. J. Bernstein's public domain information page at http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html for more particulars.

Both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation already recognize both CC0 and the Unlicense as valid and compatible public domain dedications.