Unlicense
Unlicense logo
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| Author | Arto Bendiken |
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| FSF approved | Yes |
| OSI approved | Partial (while considered free not recommended) |
| GPL compatible | Yes |
| Copyleft | No |
| Linking from code with a different license | Yes |
| Website | unlicense |
The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license with a focus on an anti-copyright message. It was first published on January 1 (Public Domain Day), 2010. The Unlicense offers a public domain waiver text with a fall-back public-domain-like license, inspired by permissive licenses but without an attribution clause. In 2015, GitHub reported that approximately 102,000 of their 5.1 million licensed projects (2% of licensed projects on GitHub.com) use the Unlicense.
In a post published on January 1 (Public Domain Day), 2010, Arto Bendiken outlined his reasons for preferring public domain software, namely: the nuisance of dealing with licensing terms (for instance license incompatibility), the threat inherent in copyright law, and the impracticability of copyright law.
On January 23, 2010, Bendiken followed-up on his initial post. In this post, he explained that the Unlicense is based on the copyright waiver of SQLite with the no-warranty statement from the MIT License. He then walked through the license, commenting on each part.
In a post published in December 2010, Bendiken further clarified what it means to "license" and "unlicense" software.
On January 1, 2011, Bendiken reviewed the progress and adoption of the Unlicense. He admits that it is "difficult to give estimates of current Unlicense adoption" but suggests there are "many hundreds of projects using the Unlicense".
The license terms of the Unlicense is as follows:
The Free Software Foundation states that "Both public domain works and the lax license provided by the Unlicense are compatible with the GNU GPL." However, for dedicating software to the public domain it recommends CC0 over the Unlicense, stating that CC0 "is more thorough and mature than the Unlicense".
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