Where now?
Patrick Vessey
initiative helps to fill a pretty glaring hole in the 'free' software
ecosystem.
I am curious, however, at how people see the adoption of the non-
licence (and this Google group) growing? Is it simply hoped that word
of mouth will lead more into the public domain fold, or are there
plans to attempt to raise the Unlicense profile with, for example, an
article on a prominent FOSS website/blog (e.g. on the Law channel of
Red Hat's opensource.com)?
P
Arto Bendiken
wrote:
> Firstly, my congratulations to the Unlicense founders -- the
> initiative helps to fill a pretty glaring hole in the 'free' software
> ecosystem.
Thank you, Patrick. Since we developed the Unlicense for personal
reasons (as implied in my initial blog post on Jan 1st), it has been
both surprising and gratifying to witness the wider interest in the
notion.
While the Unlicense is clearly controversial in the deeply divided
reactions it evokes, the long tail of software developers favorable to
the notion has turned out to be rather less sparsely populated than I
would have imagined (say, about 20% generally in favor instead of my
initial guess of 1-2%).
> I am curious, however, at how people see the adoption of the non-
> licence (and this Google group) growing? Is it simply hoped that word
> of mouth will lead more into the public domain fold, or are there
> plans to attempt to raise the Unlicense profile with, for example, an
> article on a prominent FOSS website/blog (e.g. on the Law channel of
> Red Hat's opensource.com)?
Speaking only for myself, my first priority has been to ensure that
anyone who wants to take the concept and run with it can do so. I
wouldn't necessarily want the Unlicense movement, such as it is, to
have a centralized leadership or "a plan", but rather to function as
an emergent meritocracy.
This is why I took the time to write the in-depth explanation and
rationale [1] of the Unlicense's wording. This is why Unlicense.org
contains no explicit attribution; authorship being merely implied via
links to this group and to the relevant blog posts of early adopters.
This is why all the material on Unlicense.org is available on GitHub
[2] to enable collaboration should anyone desire to step up to that.
Beyond the aforementioned, I will keep tracking the dissemination of
the Unlicense and will be posting somewhat periodic updates to my blog
and to this group. For instance, I will try and find the time sometime
early next week to blog a first-month review tentatively titled
"Tracking the Unlicense: Are We a Microsoft Conspiracy?".
Since all the writing on my blog is, naturally, in the public domain,
anyone should certainly feel free to repost any of these articles to
prominent FLOSS websites such as those you mention, or even to use my
blog posts as source material for their own articles. I hope that
other early adopters of the Unlicense will make their blog posts
likewise available for redistribution and syndication.
Now, at this point we are as of yet very, very early into early
adoption of the Unlicense. We have barely left the cradle. The way I
see it, the key people to try and attract at this point are those
already one foot or two feet into the public domain. I have been and
will be attempting to gather existing proponents of the public domain
to this group, and I would invite everyone here to do likewise.
When there are better answers to the implicit usual concerns of "how
long has it been around?" and "who's already using it", I am expecting
some uptake from the "centrist" crowd, i.e. those presently using
licenses such as MIT, BSD or ISC. I think that this is largely a
function of time passing and the Unlicense being perceived as
"established".
This permissive end of the open-source crowd is an audience that is
open to persuasion, though the most effective arguments are likely to
be utilitarian and practical rather than principled and ethical. Since
my own interest in the Unlicense really stems from the latter, i.e.
from ethical considerations, I'm probably not its most effective
proponent in practical terms.
As for the copyleft crowd, I'm not sure that reason and persuasion
will be at all effective in reaching them. The current reactions to
the Unlicense from people wedded to the GPL approach 100% negative,
and scathingly negative [3] at that. Their concept of "Freedom" has
very little to do with e.g. the classical liberal or libertarian
views. So, personally I would be inclined to simply ignore this crowd
segment for purposes of outreach.
That said, I believe that changing the incentives and leading by
example are among the most effective forms of persuasion. The
Unlicense initiative wouldn't exist without SQLite's example, and
SQLite's success has done (and will do) more for advancing (or as of
yet, simply holding the line for) the public domain in software than a
million words would.
So, to sum up, I myself won't be doing all that much activism or
outreach per se. My time is limited and I would rather spend it
writing great public domain software than in the rather ambitious
quest of trying to rhetorically convince people to re-examine their
assumptions about copyright. I may produce the occasional pamphlet or
polemic, but hopefully there are enough others to lead the good fight
on the battlefield of ideas.
I should also note here that we are already seeing traffic to
Unlicense.org from important Google search phrases such as "how do i
put code in the public domain?", "public domain software disclaimer
template", "public domain software no warranty statement", etc. Given
time, Unlicense.org will rank highly on just about any combination of
keywords or phrases related to the subject.
Thus I don't think we *necessarily* need to try and "sell" the
Unlicense per se, when potential "buyers" can so easily find us
themselves. Others may disagree, however, and certainly each and every
effort to preserve and advance the public domain, for example by
disseminating the Unlicense, is to be lauded.
--
Arto Bendiken | http://ar.to/
[1] http://ar.to/2010/01/dissecting-the-unlicense
[2] http://github.com/bendiken/unlicense.org
[3] http://identi.ca/notice/18828459
Ben Lavender
<patrick...@googlemail.com> wrote:
Howdy, and good to have you around.
> Firstly, my congratulations to the Unlicense founders -- the
> initiative helps to fill a pretty glaring hole in the 'free' software
> ecosystem.
The 'ecosystem' already had it; a number of people have gone down this
road. The real benefits here are googleability and having the
framework in hand for developers. In my mind, public domain simply
exists--there's no way it could be missing, unlike any particular
license could be!
> I am curious, however, at how people see the adoption of the non-
> licence (and this Google group) growing? Is it simply hoped that word
> of mouth will lead more into the public domain fold, or are there
> plans to attempt to raise the Unlicense profile with, for example, an
> article on a prominent FOSS website/blog (e.g. on the Law channel of
> Red Hat's opensource.com)?
>
> P
A prime consideration for the unlicense template is that it's targeted
at developers. The reason for this is that developers own the code,
at the end of the day, and they are the only ones who can make a
decision to unlicense it. Using the file named UNLICENSE is much more
meaningful than most people think--it's a way for developers to notice
that a project they are using is public domain, and it hopefully draws
attention to that fact.
Developers read blogs, of course, but law blogs and liberty reddits
are not the most effective way to reach this audience, unfortunately.
A more effective way is for developers to see that projects they
respect and use are unlicense'd, and the even better would be for a
developer on some wildly popular framework or project to switch to it
and blog about it, or perhaps even better, to copy/paste some code and
blog about it. Programmers are by and large a meritocratic bunch, and
editors of discussion boards are simply not as important to them as
people who write database abstraction layers (for example). 10
opensource.com front-page articles would be less effective than one
4-paragraph margin note from a core rails or wordpress developer.
So I would not imagine myself spending a lot of effort trying to 'talk
up' the topic on aggregation or 'news' websites. That being said, the
hard part is getting one of them to do a front-page post on this sort
of thing, not writing it, so if you know someone on such a site
willing to give it some coverage, I'd happily help tweak one of the
existing blog posts for that site's audience.
Ben
Zachary Voase
It's great to have your support!
I've got to agree with Arto and Ben, in that the best way to foster adoption is to release software under (or perhaps 'above') the Unlicense. On the other hand, I am interested in aggressively promoting the Unlicense, and the public domain in general. This basically stems from a selfish desire -- I want to be able to use other developers' PD software, and the more there is out there, the better. Programmers are also some of the most rational thinkers, so if we can get a PD movement going, somewhere down the line we might be looking at some full-blown libertarians :)
Firstly, I think blogging is quite an effective way to get the idea of PD into developers' minds and on their tongues, but to really hook them, establishing a steady stream of unlicense'd software is the answer. The combination of the two would be optimal: there are those who prefer to be told something, and those who prefer to be shown.
Secondly, and in contrast to 'grassroots' blogging, an article from an 'authoritative' source such as Wired magazine (or, indeed, Red Hat) would likely have a huge conversion effect -- a lot of developers read and trust these sources, much more so than they would an average blog post on Hacker News. If presented with an opportunity to get such an article out there, I would leap at the chance.
So that's my opinion on the matter. As Arto said, there need not be a central plan of any kind -- we'll just do whatever we can and see how it goes. Thanks again for your interest,
-- Zack
Peter Saint-Andre
> So that's my opinion on the matter. As Arto said, there need not be a
> central plan of any kind -- we'll just do whatever we can and see how
> it goes.
Linus Torvalds once said:
"My own personal goal has pretty much always just been to live a nice
life. That has many facets to it -- Linux obviously being one. Technical
interest mixed in with a ton of joy in interacting with people even if
only electronically. I certainly see that as a continual part of my
life, but I'm not making any five-year plans. Look at what happened to
countries that tried that — I think they are equally destructive in
personal life."
And I think they are equally destructive in spreading ideas. :)
Peter
--
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/