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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

What's the advantage of MIT vs CC Zero? Someone told me that I should use CC0 instead of MIT.

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

They are completely different licenses. Read the text and decide on the license if you like it. CC0 is effectively the closest we have to international public domain.

I would argue that WTFPL[0] is also fairly close to being a public domain, right there next to CC0. Even FSF recognizes it as a valid (but not a recommended) license[1].

[0] http://www.wtfpl.net/

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL

The difference being that large bureaucratic organizations need an army of lawyers to approve the use of open source libraries, and using a common license that is already understood (e.g. CC0) will result in a far smoother experience when the developers in that organization try to use anything to make their miserable lives a touch nicer.

source: I have formerly lead one of the described miserable lives.

No, it isn't. It's so far from CC0 it's ridiculous.

It has no explicit right grant at all, no disclaimer of warranties, blah blah blah blah blah.

(i've been through all the issues before on hacker news)

No, it isn’t. WTFPL isn’t even valid in lots of countries

MIT requires attribution / preservation of the copyright notice in both source and binary redistributions. It's rather more like CC-BY (although CC-BY is fairly strong, and has a "no additional restrictions" clause, it seems...).

MIT is all-permissive and compatible with everything. Roughly the only reason to use CC0 instead of MIT would be if you don't want to require people to preserve the copyright and legal notice itself, which may be appropriate for small code samples where even that might be mildly onerous.

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