Possibility of dual-licensing?

[thomasfsteeples]

utf8.h is currently published under the Unlicense, putting its work in the public domain. This is great, but there are open questions as to whether this is valid in all jurisdictions (Germany being the most famous example).

As such, would you be at all willing to consider dual-licensing this software under the Unlicense and another "fallback" license? The CC0 license is another public domain license with a clause for what should happen when the terms of the license are deemed invalid under local law. Alternatively, there exist other minimal OSI approved licenses (such as the MIT license, the ISC license and the BSD licenses) which are permissive. These typically require attribution from the user, but if the software were dual-licensed, it would be entirely their choice which license they want to use.

Absolutely no worries if this is too big an ask, just really want to be able to use this software in a more legally-watertight way.

[sheredom]

I did think about CC0 - but it likewise hasn't be tried in a court to prove it works. I have a personal distaste for dual licensing just because it adds words (stupid reason I know) but if this was the reason stopping you using the library I might consider it. I know the other popular libraries https://github.com/nothings/stb are dual licensed.

[thomasfsteeples]

I have a personal distaste for dual licensing just because it adds words (stupid reason I know) but if this was the reason stopping you using the library I might consider it.

So this is currently stopping me from using the library for one project, but I certainly use utf8.h for other things. Entirely up to you, but I feel dual-licensing with MIT, say, offers flexibility to users, without the project really losing anything. Equally, I completely respect the choice to public domain the code, and to not dual license it. Ultimately, up to you, and happy for you to close the issue with whatever you decide.

[untyper]

If dual licensing is necessary, then I think it's a much better idea to use the more permissive license's of Zlib or Boost rather than MIT.

[sheredom]

This is the problem with dual licensing in general tbh - no-one can agree on what is best. In reality the 'safest' dual license is Apache 2.0 for the patent waiver fun (yay 😢) - but it'd be more in the spirit of my contributions to dual license between unlicense and CC0.

[crt333]

Would the MIT No Attribution license (MIT-0) work?