Friends,
Thanks to the efforts of githubbers Ben Lavender (@bhuga) and Phil
Haack (@haacked), GitHub users creating new repositories are now
offered "Public Domain (Unlicense)" as a licensing option in a
user-friendly license drop-down menu. Choosing this option will
automatically create an initial commit with a LICENSE file containing
the text of the Unlicense.
See the screenshot at [1], or, see the feature in action at [2]. (And
yes, the Unlicense is still the very last option in the drop-down
menu, but with alphabetical ordering that's a given, whether sorted by
'P' or 'U').
Also, the Unlicense is similarly featured on the new companion
ChooseALicense.com website launched by GitHub a couple of days ago [3,
4].
This is a significant milestone, and I predict this move will
significantly increase our adoption rate; which, incidentally, isn't
doing too shoddily in any case, with 1,000+ unlicensed projects
already on GitHub [5].
Still, the power of defaults can be witnessed using GitHub's real-time
code search, which shows that already 21 brand spanking new unlicensed
repositories have been created using this feature since it went live
on GitHub last night [6].
According to recent research, the majority of repositories on GitHub
contain no licensing information at all [7]. It seems that it is this
growing license-free [8] trend ("the kids these days!") that GitHub is
attempting to address through the roll-out of these features, and we
can only be thankful that they have enough of an eye towards the
future to have included the public domain as one default option
(unlike, say, Google Code, who expressly prohibit public domain code).
[1]
https://twitter.com/theunlicense/status/357319194666209280/photo/1
[2]
https://github.com/new
[3]
http://choosealicense.com/licenses/
[4]
http://choosealicense.com/licenses/public-domain/
[5]
https://github.com/search?q=unlicense&type=Code&s=indexed
[6]
https://github.com/search?q=unlicense+path%3A%2FLICENSE&type=Code&s=indexed
[7]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/18/github_licensing_study/
[8]
http://ar.to/2010/12/licensing-and-unlicensing
--
Arto Bendiken | @bendiken |
http://ar.to/