Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Releasing code without a license

Author:Ken MacLeod
Posted:8/25/2000; 9:18:46 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/25/2000
Msg #:20194 (In response to 20167)
Prev/Next:20193 / 20195

Then I released the source code. No license agreement. Also no restrictions on what anyone could do with it. Now here's the question. Is this open source?

Yes. This was often how it was done before "Open Source" became a big thing and people began to clarify the rights they were giving others in using their code. Most people who do "simple" stuff like this (and comp.sources... stuff) tend to pick BSD, X, MIT licenses or LGPL/GPL (for the basic premises outlined here, not generally for any deeper reason).

Quite a bit of code is still published this way. It's usually not until the code base gets particularly large that people begin thinking about an explicit license.

Going deeper though (and there are better analysis of this that I don't have a handy URL for), as an author this code is automatically copyrighted by you and you have all the inherent rights of copyright under international law. According to my vague understanding of copyright (IANAL, of course), this means no one can modify it, derive from it, republish it, or obscure that you wrote it. Hence, the technicality of a need for an explicit license by you to allow any of that.

Common usage of code published without a license ignores most of those rights. Note that international copyright has become much stronger since the '80s and just because no one's ended up in court yet doesn't mean they won't.

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