The WTFPL, Unlicense, and MIT-0 shouldn't be recommended #775
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For putting works in the public domain there are a handful of choices. However, they are not all equal, especially when it comes to validity in places where the "public domain" is not legally recognized, for e.g. the Unlicense is not global and has serious issues, which states that the Unlicense in explicitly illegal in some places like Germany, where Codeberg is based out of, and I am not a lawyer but I expect the WTFPL has those same issues too with the way it is written. There are much better choices than those two, such as the CC0 and MIT-0 licenses. I don't think the WTFPL and Unlicense should be forbidden on Codeberg but I just think they shouldn't be recommended in the Wiki.
The Codeberg FAQ states:
If you do not care about copyrighting your works, please consider using a public domain declaration (e.g. Unlicense, Creative Commons Zero for multimedia assets), or licenses of similar nature (e.g. WTFPL, MIT No Attribution)., which makes it sound like the Unlicense and CC0 license are made for assets and not code, but the Unlicense only refers to software in it's text and the official CC0 FAQ statesYes, CC0 is suitable for dedicating your copyright and related rights in computer software to the public domain, to the fullest extent possible under law.and is a quite popular choice for public domain software.Actually, after reading the MIT-0 license, I am not convinced it is valid globally either. The original page for it states the steps:
Take the widely used, true and tried «MIT License»; Remove the only condition it has; Reword the preceding sentence so that it does not mention any conditions; Finished!But this is quite stupid as implied authorship rights need to not just be not declared but also explicitly taken away for the work to have no terms attached, especially for it to be valid in places with different laws. From that page, It seems the purpose of the MIT-0 license was because the CC0 license was too long (???) so they thought they could just take some other license and shorten it (?????). Each line in the CC0 is there for a reason...
The Creative Commons Zero is the only license out of these that was made by a lawyer and is the only one that should actually be used.
WTFPL and Unlicense shouldn't be recommendedto The WTFPL, Unlicense, and MIT-0 shouldn't be recommendedI don't have a strong opinion on this. Both WTFPL and Unlicense are considered to be compatible with GPL licenses according to the FSF. Not all Codeberg users are subject to the same jurisdiction and one or the other license may work better for them. Maybe we could find a phrase suggesting CC0 at first, but do not exclude the others?
Interesting. Another thing to note is that it looks like both the WTFPL and MIT-0 ("No Attribution") are both recommended against (they recommended to not use them) by the FSF.