Licence details

Works referring to this page are licensed under 0BSD, an OSI approved open source licence:


Copyright 2023 The Author <http://©️.st>

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM
LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR
PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

Why?

This licence gives you as much freedom as possible but avoids some pitfalls of some similar "public domain like" licences. It does not require you to copy a copyright line around like most *BSD derived licences. For example CC0 has patent issues (Fedora doesn't allow it anymore), Unlicense is disallowed by Google, WTFPL is somewhat questionable (do you want to write code or debate what the F-word means?) and the "public domain" does not exist in all countries. For some more background on 0BSD see Toybox's licence.

Should I use this?

If you compare the ISC licence and 0BSD you'll notice the only difference is the part about duplicating the permission notice. I am not a lawyer and for real advice you should talk to one; however I believe this is the ideal licence to use for small projects and code samples, where dealing with a copyright notice is a pain. The one downside is this means end users may not see the disclaimer of warranty (because the licence doesn't require it to be duplicated), which is more a problem for applications rather than libraries or code samples, so for applications distributed to end users (particularly in binary form) you may wish to use the ISC licence. This is not legal advice.

Another similar licence called MIT-0 exists, written by AWS. Both are OSI approved.

How to apply this?

For projects add a COPYING (preferred) or LICENSE file (has to be the American English spelling for most tools to pick it up) and for avoidance of doubt you should add: 

SPDX-License-Identifier: 0BSD
In a comment, within each file or code sample. See SPDX IDs for more details.

You may also link to http://©.st/github-username to get a personalised version of this page. For example (just update your username in the URL and copy the text): 

// © The Octocat <http://©.st/octocat>
// SPDX-License-Identifier: 0BSD
This is easy to copy and paste and include at the top of code samples or other small projects, leaving no question about the author and license applied. Plus as it is 0BSD it is fine to remove the copyright line.