And I can't because there are a bunch of, for want of a better word, dweebs who care about this stuff. I don't give a single solitary frick about the finer points of MIT vs GPL vs BSD 3 clause vs CC-BY-NC or whatever-the-hell. But y'all are forcing me to care by making the legal frameworks for software ever more strict and confusing.
I take a maximalist view, don't want the code copied, sliced up, re-used in any form whatsoever with no credit? Don't post it on a code sharing site. Like I say in the OP, in my job I obviously have to follow the rules, but on an ideological level I'll ignore them where I can get away with it outside of work.
If you don't want the code to be used, don't post it online,
I'm curious if this view is software specific or relates to any work released online? For example, do you feel similarly about a novelist or graphic artist? I reckon at least a few software engineers look at what they produce not entirely differently from how an artist or writer looks at theirs.
First to be flippant the idea of a software developer with that view sounds so unbearably insufferable and full of themselves I hope never to meet one. All code is terrible, be less attached.
Stream of consciousness: Should artists or writers be paid for what they produce? Yes. So why not software developers? I'm paid for what I produce. But then I don't release the stuff I'm paid for for free on the internet. But I'm against DRM, I also think Winnie the Pooh shouldn't have IP protection (now expired). What makes art or literature a different commons from software? I also think all scientific journals should be available for free. Do artists and writers have an alternative route to make money from what they publish, what is the artistic or writer equivalent of open source? I think this is the crux of it, if we're going to do open source let's actually do it and stop being precious about it but this only applies to freely-entered open source. So does that mean I support some form of copyright after all? Then again some old out-of-print books will sell for Amazon for like $4000 so we should be able to copy those for free.
Ultimately it's a question of what a vision for society without copyright would look like. I think software is uniquely placed to start exploring that idea. How would we make a living of software if anyone could reverse engineer (even our proprietary) code freely and safely?
The reason I ask with writers in particular is because, like code, having access to it necessarily means that the viewer has the ability to copy it as much as they'd like. Unlike software, however, there is no ability to keep the source code private in a book while still having users.
I definitely agree that copyright protections have become far too strong but I don't think we can really ever know if we would have be able to build the strong open source community we have today without coopting the copyright system for copyleft protections. At the same time, perhaps we are past the point where it's necessary and now it's holding us back... it's entirely possible!
To the first thought, I personally see some coding as a creative act (some is doing _a lot_ of work there though). It's not because I fancy myself a Picasso but because I think some (again, doing a lot of work!) solutions/ideas have a bit of their creator in them and, for those works, the author should be able to exert some control over their works. I think this is more philosophical than legal/political, but I would disagree that its flippant :)
You don’t need an “official” license, although I agree creative commons is closer to what you want. I feel like you can pretty easily write a license file that explicitly waives all of your rights and responsibilities. Such simplicity is after all what made MIT such a popular license, even though it’s not substantially different from Apache.
And I can't because there are a bunch of, for want of a better word, dweebs who care about this stuff. I don't give a single solitary frick about the finer points of MIT vs GPL vs BSD 3 clause vs CC-BY-NC or whatever-the-hell. But y'all are forcing me to care by making the legal frameworks for software ever more strict and confusing.
I take a maximalist view, don't want the code copied, sliced up, re-used in any form whatsoever with no credit? Don't post it on a code sharing site. Like I say in the OP, in my job I obviously have to follow the rules, but on an ideological level I'll ignore them where I can get away with it outside of work.
If you don't want the code to be used, don't post it online,