How hard is it to give away free stuff?
How hard can it be to give something away for free? Very, very, very hard – or so it would seem.
Jamie from the 37signals team did a great thing on Monday, and posted a blog entry with some free icons you could download. The intentions were explained pretty clearly: “They’re free for you to use and (hopefully) improve upon.”
“Not so fast!! You can’t just give something away without a formal license and some strings attached.” That was the cry from the comments.
The response from JF on the 37signals team was this:
What a perfect example of people making something more complicated than it needs to be.
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This doesn’t have to involve the legal system at all. That’s the problem. Why do we assume that if someone wants to give something away for free, lawyers have to be part of it?
Break the chain. Lawyers don’t have to be involved in everything. This blog post can serve as the “license” or “proof” of his intention. And if you just asked Jamie to explain further, I’m sure he would. We don’t need complicated licenses or third parties. Simple statements, obvious intention, that’s plenty.
Obviously, it’s really hard to give stuff away for free. Jeff Atwood discovered this quite some time ago, and posted about it on Coding Horror.
Experienced developers won’t touch unlicensed code because they have no legal right to use it. That’s ironic, considering the whole reason I posted the code in the first place was so other developers could benefit from that code. I could have easily avoided this unfortunate situation if I had done the right thing and included a software license with my code.
[From: Pick a License, Any License, Jeff Atwood, April 3 2007]
He then provides a rather humorous comparison chart between the various licenses and even shows that the GLP is not the right license for capitalists.
Are we too caught up in the legal implications of using other people’s stuff without a proper license, even if they clearly state we can use it for free? It would seem so.
For now, it seems the simplest solution is to slap a Creative Commons Zero on stuff we want to release freely. It’s public domain, in an apparently acceptably formal and legalese manner.