I would say yes. But the same is true with MIT even if not every dev lived in the US.
With MIT, the only thing required is to credit back to the original authors, am I correct?
No, you are required to distribute the license text with your âproductâ. You canât strip the license text (and thus remove the copyright) or claim youâre the author â but you are free to sub-license it or use it in your GPL project or closed source project or do whatever you want as long as you deliver the original license text.
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With CCO, do you have to put in any legal document or textfile or anything?
I donât know CC0 very well (this is part of the problem, i would guess most people around software donât) but i would say yes, of course. Because if you donât need to, you would violate certain rights. Let me make an example:
Your goal seems to be to download Redox and do whatever you want. For the sake of argument lets say you wanna make a new OS âXoderâ and sell this OS for $14,99 without the âburdenâ to hand over the MIT license text from the original Redox OS. So in order to do that lets say we hypothetically changed Redox to CC0. If CC0 would permit to do that (which i donât think it does) and you would write into the documentation or into the program that you are the only author you would immediately violate my rights. The laws in Germany forbids that and no license â CC0 included â can negate those rights. Lets say you donât want to sell Xoder for $14,99 but keep it open source but just delete the copyright text and want companies to use Xoder because reasons. Companies could get in heavy trouble by using your code because i still have the non transferable german copyright by law and companies would assume its public domain, or whatever. And now i could sue these companies and i guess i would be in the right here. It would be terrible if this would be possible.
So this could not work, in my opinion. In the end CC0 has nothing to offer over MIT. It just have a more complicated and longer license text, collisions with many jurisdictions around the world, is not established and proven in the software world. I canât find so called âportsâ to other countries/jurisdictions of CC0 like the ones for other Create Commons licenses. I donât really know why but i would assume its to problematic. And the more i read about CC0 the more confident i become that CC0 is a real burden for its users. You can read and understand MIT in like 2 minutes ⌠CC0 not. CC0 gains you nothing because MIT is as permissive as law allows (i assume)
Just to let you know I am no longer at all trying to persuade the Redox team into changing licenses as I understand the issues involved, I may ask questions just out of curiosity and to enhance my understanding but it does NOT mean that I am continuing to persuade you guys
Would the same issue apply if all the devs lived in countries where public domain is recognised?
With MIT license, are end users able to still own the code, provided that they follow the license agreement?
Or make a custom licence like Linux (GPL) ?
Unlicense, WTFPL or CCO is not a good idea assuming that author wonât be listed and has 0 controll over itâs work
How is GPL a custom license?
Maybe GPL is good for alpha and beta releases so that people are forced to give back the source code but when it is officially released it is good idea to be either MIT/BSD or Unlicense.
elaborate why is either good idea?
MIT/BSD/Unlicense allows any user to do literally whatever they want, even redistribute it under a closed source application if they so chose to. GPL restricts that. I believe that when the user gets the source code or software, they should own the product, not have restrictions and not own the copy of the produt.
Do we want people spamming github with renamed redox repositories or do we want to focus development on redox? Linux mentality⌠if you have Shit software do you want ppl to fork it, make a supperior fork and ruin your project with it or do you want them to fork it and then make a MR to original repository and delete it after itâs merged -> allowing way more effective development and excluding personall emotions.
Do we really want Redox to be redistributed as closed-source? After experience with Apple using ârenamed, stripped and insane linuxâ iâm not quite sure + Do we want to really support closed-source distribution of redox?
If we use unlicence, WTFPL or CCO anyone can practically file a patent or licence the code that is present and prevent original developer to work on itâs own code or even sue redox developers for breaking 3rd party licence⌠-> Really really bad ideaâŚ
Iâm still for GPL or forking GPL for redoxâs usage
Why doesnât the Redox project make it GPL then, there must be a reason?
yes assuming that itâs the most open-source friendly licence or make custom.
Thereâs a lot of confusion and misconceptions in this post.
Licensing is a complex issue and statements like âlicence X provides more freedom than licence Yâ are simply too naive to be helpful.
There are many licenses that have been created for software but using some that are not widely used have consequences (in particular sharing code with other projects is not always possible). Moreover, licenses that are widely used like GPL and MIT have been tested juridically in some juridiction, providing jurisprudence and making them more robust. More exotic licences have not and are likely to be fragile.
GPL and MIT represent the two main streams that exist in Free & Open Source software:
- do whatever you want with the code but any change must be redistributed with the same licence (GPL)
- do whatever you want with the code, including changing the licence
Some people argue that the first one is removing a freedom from some users (other developers, IT companies âŚ) by not allowing to change the license. Some argue that the second one is removing a freedom from some users by allowing non-free software to be created with the help of it.
RedoxOS creators explicitly made the choice of the second, wanting to allow companies (among others) to use RedoxOS if they want without having to redistribute the source code even when they do modifications.
Creative Commons licenses have not been designed for software, as they explain in their FAQ.
We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as âopen sourceâ by the Open Source Initiative.
WTFPL is just a joke, has never been tested in court and no serious project should actually use it.