I have a public repository for an open source project on GitHub. It's main goal is to
- make this code available to anybody (including myself) who may what to use it, for free, for all the time, with no future possibility of suing them (or me) for anything
- make the process of contribution to this code as easy as possible, while maintaining the first requirement
In two words - I'd like to give away all the copyright for it (not sure if public domain is the correct word here, I'm not a layer, but that's what comes to my mind) and force any other contributors to do the same with less efforts.
UPDATE: as others correctly mentioned, these "two words" were incorrect, they didn't correspond to my goal, because giving away copyright does not give the protection from being sued. So lets just stick to the goal - make software free, and easy to contribute to with disclaimer in mind.
So I've chosen the MIT license as the most suitable and added a LICENCSE
file with it inside to the root folder of the project. Also I've added a link to it to the README
file (according to this answer). But the following questions arise when I try to set up everything correctly:
Copyright info part in the main
LICENCSE
file. There is no company or any other name for the group of people that are contributing to this project. And I hope more and more will join, so it looks like a pain to maintain the list of contributors. Is there a way to just drop this line or to call them, sayMyProjectName developers
not to update it later on?Contributor License Agreement. Ideal case will be when the fact that file belongs to the project source immediately mean that it is under MIT license and copyright is no more important. Is it possible or valid from jurisdiction point of view? I'm using CLA Hub to verify that every contributor has signed corresponding CLA. Is that enough?
License header per source file in this project. Is it really necessary to include some kind of link to the
LICENSE
file to each source file? According to answer to this question - yes. But is there any exception for exact MIT license? Can I just say something likeThis license apply to each file of this project
at the end of theLICENSE
file?Copyright info in the header per source file in this project. This is similar to the first question - is it ok not to add it or add some general name for copyright owners like
MyProjectName developers
. Otherwise maintaining this up to date is even more pain - I have to track every file in every commit and pull request. I've read this question, but it mostly says that it is necessary to apply copyright later (either in form of re-license or in any other). But I want to make it not relevant (see item 2.)Are there any other things I may be missing?
Is there any easier way to achieve this goal? This question was asked for some best practice and in this part it is very similar to mine, but it was not properly answered.