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chayleaf | 4 years ago

0BSD is nice as well. As a bonus, it's the only PD-equivalent license allowed in Google.

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contravariant|4 years ago

Arguably allowing your work to be used by anyone except Google is a feature not a bug.

683686285|4 years ago

I assume Google's legal department is not irrational and that they are worrying about something that could happen to anyone.

Bostonian|4 years ago

You publish open source code so that others can benefit from it, and if Google uses it maybe billions of people will benefit from it, so I disagree.

freemint|4 years ago

A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here https://youtu.be/MkJkyMuBm3g

chrismorgan|4 years ago

Good call. I had somehow quite forgotten about it, though I know I read all the N-clause BSD variants a decade or so ago. I’ve added a section at the end with that as an alternative recommendation.

Jach|4 years ago

Google uses Sqlite, which is simply public domain. Did someone at Google actually purchase one of their pseudo-license 'warranty of title' documents they offer for companies (supposedly mostly in other countries that officially don't recognize PD grants) with more legal budget than sense? Google also uses SBCL, which is mostly public domain "in jurisdictions where this is possible, or under the FreeBSD licence where not." Does the entry for it in the list of third party software say Google is using it under the FreeBSD license or PD? (They also employ at least one developer who is a core maintainer on the side.)

The legal department's default answer is "no" to anything they haven't already said "yes" to, so it wouldn't surprise me if your default options are limited. But presumably with useful enough software under other PD-equivalent things they could be forced to say "yes". As an aside I'd be very interested to know the extent of internal audits Google does on its code for legal risks in un-cleared-by-legal dependencies, dependencies-of-dependencies, and presence of code derived from stack overflow/popular books/random places on the internet indexed by google.