unlicense
The Promising Future of the Unlicense
January 13, 2010 - 18:35 — bhugaSo the public launch of the unlicense movement on January 1st has gone better than expected. Arto's post hit top of the list for 'most controversial' on Reddit for a while, and unlicense.org itself is seeing decent traffic. Since the target audience of the site is developers, even a few thousand eyeballs is a good number, and that number is being handily beaten.
There are three main concerns that seem to keep appearing in discussions in regards to releasing software into the public domain. I'd like to briefly offer a response to them, and then provide an example of why public domain might be what you're looking for for your software.
Concern 1: Only the GPL preserves Freedom!
This is amazing to me. There is an incredible amount of worry, it seems, that faceless corporate Cthulhu-associated entities are lurking in the shadows, just waiting to pounce on vulnerable code unprotected by the GPL's armor. These faceless horrors have crushed promising startup projects with vulnerable licenses like Apache (the world's most-installed web server), SQLite (the world's most-installed SQL server) (and public domain, not actually licensed at all, by the way), BIND (the world's most-installed DNS server), and other sad stories. I find this concern so unrealistic it boggles the mind.
But just for fun, let's start a real flame war. Numerous folks out there claim, with a certain sort of correctness, that the GPL keeps software free from the lockdown of derivative works. This is called Freedom (capital F). However, that software's Freedom is enforced by a copyright, which restricts the actions of people by proscribing certain kinds of copy and use. These proscriptions are enforced via a system with far reaching effects, which prevent me, for example, from purchasing a DVD player that disregards region codes.
The inevitable conclusion is that the GPL is about valuing the 'Freedom' of bits over the freedom of humans.
You, dear reader, are far more important than my code, regardless of your choice of license. I have no time for a moral system that makes such claims on your autonomy. I will avoid that system as much as possible: by using the unlicense.
Concern 2: Statutory Law vs Common Law
Statutory law, such as that of many European states, often fails to specify a process for explicit public domain donations, leading many to wonder if such a thing is even possible. Folks better educated than I seem to have differing opinions. But I'll note that if you're concerned about it, there is precedent. The original w3 server, which was owned by CERN (guess what the 'E' stands for?), was placed into the public domain in 1993.
Apache and Netscape both trace their heritage back to European public-domain software. You'd be foolish to accept this post as legal advice, of course, but in my mind, those are perfectly acceptable European counter-examples.
Concern 3: Moral rights cannot be relinquished
A true concern, many jurisdictions specifically prohibit the relinquishment of 'moral rights' of authorship, namely, the right to be the named author of a work, and the right to not have works you did not author attributed to you. To my mind, this a not a problem of copyright, it's basically statutory encoding of the fact of authorship. The issue is muddied by several states conflating copyright enforcement with moral rights enforcement. While again not legal advice, I'd say that simple attribution covers you.
Concerns 2 and 3 really bother me, because legal arguments against them are complicated and require specialized knowledge. I'm not qualified to argue them in a bulletproof manner. But most software will never become big enough to have a license (or unlicense) issue, and you can issue someone an explicit license if it's ever a problem (as SQLite does).
How public domain lets your software grow
"CERN's decision to make the Web foundations and protocols available on a royalty free basis, and without additional impediments, was crucial to the Web's existence. Without this commitment, the enormous individual and corporate investment in Web technology simply would never have happened, and we wouldn't have the Web today."
Tim Berners-Lee, Director, WWW Consortium
The public domain is the best way that others can take your ideas and run with them. CERN's public-domain dedication is probably the best example of that, but if you want your software to change the world, you need to allow others to use it as freely as possible. I'll give you a little personal example.
A few days ago, I published promising future, a Ruby gem that adds Scheme-style promises and futures to Ruby. I did this because I happen to love promises and futures, and it drives me absolutely nuts whenever they are not available.
If my goal is (and it is) to always have promises and futures available, the ideal would be that it were in the Ruby core library, or even a language future. I could start a rallying cry on a mailing list somewhere, and may yet, but my odds are slim. But what if a much better known author, with a much more popular library, wants to use these lovely little things in his code? Well, they could add a gem dependency, but that's not a popular option for various reasons. If the licenses work out, they could incorporate the code, usually requiring a note of attribution.
But my promises and futures code has the maximum possible flexibility. Anyone, with or without any license, can copy/paste my promises and futures into their code, without attribution, and be done with it. Problem solved. My code lives on, or at least inspires the creation of equivalent functionality implemented in a better way. And maybe, one day in a promising future, every Rubyist everywhere will have promises and futures available. That SQLite can be embedded in other software is a huge factor in its unparalleled adoption.
How could my software be more free? How could I be more free? How could you be more free? What could be better? Public domain promises a very promising future indeed.
Quantity.rb: first-class quantities for Ruby
January 5, 2010 - 11:07 — bhugaI've just put out a first release of Quantity.rb, which scratches an itch I had and much more.
Quantity.rb provides first-class Quantity objects, like '12 meters', '1 liter', or '1 dozen'. More significantly, it supports things like '12 meters * 1 kilogram / 2 seconds**2'. It was an outgrowth of an attempt to do some automated unit conversions of a project I am working on involving some monitoring, and I wasn't happy with what was out there. In particular, I wanted to eventually provide the ability to divide one time series of data points by another, regardless of units. It needed to be something more than 'meters to feet'. Maybe it didn't need to be this involved, but it's the right way to do it: anything can be built on top of this.
It's not the first attempt, and perhaps not even the first success. Quanty is the earliest one I can find, and it does most of what I want. Unfortunately, it uses yacc, which I have no intention of learning, and the English docs are sparse. There's something called the Quantity Management Framework, but I can't find much info about it.
Besides, I figured it would be fun. I would learn something, and sometimes it's good to have a project with a well-defined scope so that you can Finish It. Especially when you have a handful of muddy projects mixed with a handful of very long term ones. So it was the charge of the light brigade. And I did learn something. Earlier versions used some class inheritance features that made me learn far more about Ruby's metaobject system than I had ever hoped to. That was kind of like this for me.
Anyways, there's more to do, but I'm pleased with the results so far. Some of the things you can do, from the README:
require 'quantity/all'
1.meter #=> 1 meter
1.meter.to_feet #=> 3.28083... foot
c = 299792458.meters / 1.second #=> 299792458 meter/second
newton = 1.meter * 1.kilogram / 1.second**2 #=> 1 meter*kilogram/second^2
newton.to_feet #=> 3.28083989501312 foot*kilogram/second^2
newton.convert(:feet) #=> 3.28083989501312 foot*kilogram/second^2
jerk_newton = newton / 1.second #=> 1 meter*kilogram/second^3
jerk_newton * 1.second == newton #=> true
mmcubed = 1.mm.cubed #=> 1 millimeter^3
mmcubed * 1000 == 1.milliliter #=> true
[1.meter, 1.foot, 1.inch].sort #=> [1 inch, 1 foot, 1 meter]
m_to_f = Quantity::Unit.for(:meter).convert_proc(:feet)
m_to_f.call(1) #=> 3.28083... (or a Rational)
It's made my IRB shell quite the handy calculator. Try it out for that, if you're CLI-inclined.
This whole affair was also an excuse to release something meaningful via the unlicense (I also did a growl-amqp thingee but it hardly counts). The unlicense is a framework for releasing code not with a license, but as public domain. Public domain is something that old timers remember: what used to older copyrighted works. Originally some pithy few years, copyright these days now lasts for an author's lifetime + 70 years, and it's been several years since anything entered the public domain in the US due to numerous extensions. Some countries have gone so far down the rabbit hole that one cannot dedicate things to the public domain.
This is all the more ridiculous when one considers that most people now believe copyright is bunk. Eventually, legal frameworks will respect how the world is, and not how it was. A lot of people won't release software under the public domain because of the spotty legal status. A few years ago, people were equally afraid of the GPL until some court cases affirmed the common-sense interpretation of the license. Let's release some public domain software and push the issue of what happens when you don't have a license at all. I was hoping to release this on the first of January for public domain day, but it needed more work. I guess it's not much of a holiday since nothing enters the public domain anymore anyway.
Anyways, 'gem install quantity' and have fun.
