Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free

Release your source-code free and unencumbered into the public domain.

“The author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law.”

It’s time for me to move away from CC Licenses and Unlicense all my publicly released code. I’ve been using the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license but I no longer feel the need to force attribution and place non-commercial-use restrictions on my work.

I should probably do something similar for all my creative output (prose, poetry, photos, art, etc).

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Who's Afraid of the Public Domain?

Five (naïve) assumptions we make about creative individuals:

1. Creative individuals would not produce their works without the possibility of making money from them.
2. Creative individuals are endowed with the inalienable right to control who may copy or modify those works, since without that “copyright” they would not be able to make money from their creative output.
3. Copyright is a straightforward extension of physical property rights and therefore a creative work is a form of intellectual property.
4. To protect the rights of creative individuals, governments may legitimately prevent others from copying or modifying creative works.
5. It is only government-enforced copyright that keeps a creative work safe from the ravages of violation and abuse; when it is no longer so protected, it lapses into a fearsome state of desuetude and disregard called the public domain.