Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free

Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free
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Unlicense Yourself
Set Your Code Free
What is the Unlicense?
The Unlicense is a template for
disclaiming copyright monopoly interest
in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the
public domain
. It combines a copyright waiver
patterned
after the
very successful
public domain
SQLite
project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used
MIT/X11 license
Why Use the Unlicense?
Because you have more important things to do than enriching lawyers or imposing petty restrictions on users of your code. How often have you passed up on utilizing and contributing to a great software library just because its
open source
license was not compatible with your own preferred
flavor
of open source? How many precious hours of your life have you spent deliberating how to license your software or worrying about licensing compatibility with other software? You will never get those hours back, but here's your chance to start cutting your losses. Life's too short, let's get back to coding.
The Unlicense
To opt out of the copyright industry's game altogether and set your code free, put your next software project into the
public domain
using the following (un)licensing statement:
This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or
distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled
binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any
means.

In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors
of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the
software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit
of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and
successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of
relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this
software under copyright law.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR
OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

For more information, please refer to
TIP
In a saner world, you would only need the first one or two paragraphs. For the time being you'll probably
want to retain
the whole shebang. (You should feel free, though, to leave out the last line containing the link to this site, if that's your preference.)
You would traditionally put the above statement into a file named
COPYING
or
LICENSE
. However, to explicitly distance yourself from the whole concept of copyright licensing, we recommend that you put your unlicensing statement in a file named
UNLICENSE
. Doing so also means that your project can more easily be found on e.g.
GitHub
or
Bitbucket
, enabling others to reuse your code in their own unencumbered public domain projects. When publishing your code to registries such as NPM or PyPI, set the license field to
Unlicense
to mark the usage of this license.
For a comprehensive listing of software using the Unlicense,
google for the first line of the Unlicense
. It was purposely worded uniquely, which means that all the returned search results are likely to relate to the Unlicense in some way.
Unlicensing Contributions
In order to ensure your project remains completely free and unencumbered by anyone's copyright monopoly, it is advisable that you ask any major contributors to explicitly dedicate their code-base contributions to the public domain.
This removes any possible ambiguity as to what terms somebody might have thought they were contributing under, in case of a future dispute. These concerns are not unique to public domain software. Most large, established open-source projects have a Contributor License Agreement (
CLA
) process, of varying degrees of formality.
At minimum, you might ask your contributors to accompany any
non-trivial
patches with a simple statement like the following:
I dedicate any and all copyright interest in this software to the
public domain. I make this dedication for the benefit of the public at
large and to the detriment of my heirs and successors. I intend this
dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all
present and future rights to this software under copyright law.
Better yet is to ask the major contributors to
digitally sign
a more explicit copyright release (see an example
WAIVER
file), and then to keep a record of such signatures in an
AUTHORS
file accompanying your software. Using
GnuPG
, contributors can sign a copyright waiver file as follows:
$ gpg --no-version --armor --sign WAIVER
Note that if a contributor makes significant changes or enhancements in their capacity as an employee of some formal organization, then the above may be insufficient and you would additionally need to ask for a copyright disclaimer signed by a company officer. For more information, have a look at
how the SQLite project handles this
. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) also
provides an example
of a simple copyright disclaimer to be signed by an employer.
TIP
For a concrete example of this contributor process, see
how the unlicensed RDF.rb project has handled this
Unlicensed Free Software
wip
Here follows a sampling of some excellent software projects that have already adopted the Unlicense or a derivative thereof:
Project
Summary
Links
ASIMOV
A polyglot development platform for trustworthy, neurosymbolic AI.
⬇️
Flows.rs
Building blocks for flow-based programming (FBP) in Rust.
⬇️
furl
URL parsing and manipulation made easy.
⬇️
gl3w
Simple OpenGL core profile loader.
⬇️
jslint
The JavaScript code quality and coverage tool.
⬇️
Kakoune
An experimental text editor heavily inspired by Vim.
⬇️
Libegpu
Libegpu is a library for enumerating eGPU devices & enclosures.
⬇️
Miniz
A single-source-file, high-performance deflate/inflate compression library with a zlib-compatible API.
⬇️
MistServer
Low-latency streaming media toolkit built for flexibility and reliability.
⬇️
NearDrop
A partial implementation of Google's Nearby Share/Quick Share for macOS.
⬇️
node-rdf
An ECMAScript/Node.js library for handling RDF data.
⬇️
Poolboy
A hunky Erlang worker pool factory.
⬇️
Postgres.js
The fastest full-featured PostgreSQL client for Node.js, Deno, Bun, and Cloudflare.
⬇️
pytube
A lightweight, dependency-free Python library (and command-line utility) for downloading YouTube videos.
⬇️
RDF.rb
A Ruby library for working with Resource Description Framework (RDF) data.
⬇️
RDF.rs
A Rust library for working with Resource Description Framework (RDF) data.
⬇️
ripgrep
A line-oriented search tool that recursively searches the current directory for a regex pattern.
⬇️
RSS-Bridge
A PHP web application that generates RSS feeds for websites that don't have one.
⬇️
stb
A set of single-file public domain libraries for C/C++.
⬇️
Tor.rb
A Ruby library for interacting with the Tor anonymity network.
⬇️
Translate Shell
A command-line translator powered by Google Translate, Bing Translator, Yandex.Translate, and Apertium.
⬇️
Tween-o-Matic
A macOS application for designing CAMediaTimingFunction animation curves.
⬇️
UN
Aiming to write a public domain all-purpose standard library for Java.
⬇️
WjCryptLib
A collection of cryptographic functions written in C.
⬇️
xsv
A command-line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting, and joining CSV files.
⬇️
youtube-dl
A command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.
⬇️
yt-dlp
A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader.
⬇️
For more projects,
search GitHub
for repositories using the Unlicense. (As of November 2024, this search returned 358,000+ distinct repositories.)
For the most comprehensive listing of software using the Unlicense,
google for the first line of the Unlicense
TIP
If you would like your own project to be potentially added to this list, please
create a pull request
on the
Registry of Unencumbered Software Projects
or tweet an addition suggestion to
@bendiken
on X.
Public Domain Software
Some examples of well-known public domain or
license-free
software libraries and applications:
CERN httpd
, the original World Wide Web daemon developed by Tim Berners-Lee, was
in the public domain
SQLite
, the
most widely-deployed
SQL database in the world, is
in the public domain
qmail
, the
second-most popular
MTA on the Internet, is
in the public domain
djbdns
, the
second-most popular
DNS server software on the Internet, is in the public domain.
libdjb
, a project aiming to make the excellent libraries from Dan Bernstein available to a wider public by extracting them from his packages and providing a minimal Makefile for each library.
NaCl
, an easy-to-use high-speed software library for network communication, encryption, decryption, signatures, etc.,
is in the public domain
BLAST
, one of the most widely used bioinformatics programs, is in the public domain.
dlmalloc
, a widely-used memory allocator implementation for C, is in the public domain.
I2P
, an anonymous overlay network implementation, is largely
in the public domain
HLA
, a high-level assembler for the x86 architecture, is in the public domain.
CMUCL
, a popular implementation of the
Common Lisp
programming language, is mostly in the public domain.
SBCL
, another popular Common Lisp implementation, is likewise mostly
in the public domain
CLIPS
, a widely-used forward-chaining, rule-based inference engine, is in the public domain.
byacc
, the Berkeley
Yacc
parser generator, is in the public domain.
Lemon
, a thread-safe LALR(1) parser generator, is in the public domain.
re2c
, a high-performance lexer generator, is in the public domain.
Docutils
, the Python text-processing system, is mostly in the public domain.
LibTomCrypt
, a portable cryptographic toolkit for C, is in the public domain.
LibTomMath
, a portable number theoretic multiple-precision integer library for C, is in the public domain.
C++ Big Integer Library
, a library for integer arithmetic, is in the public domain.
PyCrypto
, the Python cryptography toolkit, is largely in the public domain.
Crypto++
, a cryptographic library for C++, is mostly in the public domain.
MPICH2
, a high-performance implementation of the
MPI
standard, is largely in the public domain.
MinGW
's runtime, which provides POSIX compatibility for Windows, is
in the public domain
Phyz
, a soft body dynamics physics engine for Windows, is in the public domain.
NBDS
, a C library for various lock-free algorithms (including a lock-free hash table), is in the public domain.
Djehuty
, a fully-verifiable operating system written in the D programming language, is in the public domain.
XOS
, a multitasking operating system for the x86 architecture, is in the public domain.
snafu
, a small operating system written in assembly language, is in the public domain.
PDCLib
, a minimal C standard library implementation, is in the public domain.
PDPCLIB
, another C standard library implementation, is in the public domain.
PDOS
, a DOS-compatible operating system, is in the public domain.
SubC
, a fast and simple compiler for a clean subset of the C programming language, is in the public domain.
WPDCC
, a C preprocessor and compiler implementation, is in the public domain.
c11threads.h
, a simple C11 threads implementation based on POSIX threads, is in the public domain.
mpkg
, a minimalist package manager for *nix systems, is in the public domain.
For other listings of public domain software, see
Whoow
Wikipedia
SourceForge
Freecode
Ohloh
Google Code Hosting
Alioth
Savannah
Launchpad
CodePlex
RubyForge
and the
Python Cheeseshop
Other Popular Unlicenses
Some other ways to set your code free:
BOLA - Buena Onda License Agreement
is similar to the Unlicense in intent.
CC0 - Creative Commons Zero
is not intended for software per se.
WTFPL - Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License
can't be beat for blunt directness.
Unlicensing Resources
If setting your code entirely free still seems a somewhat daunting prospect, try these perspectives on for size:
Who's Afraid of the Public Domain?
The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World
What is Copyright?
Placing Documents into the Public Domain
The Unlicense: The First Year in Review
Licensed, License-Free, and Unlicensed Code
Set Your Code Free
Dissecting the Unlicense: Software Freedom in Four Clauses and a Link
Why I'm Going Public
I Just Unlicensed My Software
The Promising Future of the Unlicense
To License or to Unlicense?
Language Matters: Framing The Copyright Monopoly So We Can Keep Our Liberties
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