dgl, 7 months ago to opensource

Open source licences are one of those cans of worms I mostly try to avoid. Except it really annoys me when I want to borrow some code and I can't work out what the licence is.

If you're writing sample code or something small, you should include a #licence. However which to use? One of the *BSD or MIT licences is usually a good choice (but be careful which version!), they place minimal requirements on you. However the requirement to include a copyright notice is just annoying for everyone involved (when the code is small). Android Toybox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox) solved this with the Zero-clause BSD licence (aka #0BSD); it is a modification of the ISC license, not a BSD one, but the name doesn't matter really.

My attempt to make this easier to use is now available at http://©.st (think copyright street? © can be obtained with Option+G on a Mac, Ctrl+Atl+C on Windows, Compose o c on X11 or use the emoji selector). It's really just a way to make it easier to apply 0BSD, as it gives you some very short copy pastable comment lines. Consider 0BSD next time you write some small piece of code.

Also you can use it to test your #IDN support.

While 0BSD may not be perfect, I believe it (or MIT-0, which is nearly identical) achieves the best balance of all the "do what you want" licences. I'm mainly talking about "small" pieces of code here; for larger projects it's understandable the licence choice is more nuanced and you may want Apache, #GPL, etc. This is not legal advice. Talk to a lawyer if in doubt.

#OSS #opensource #license #licences #bsd #mit0