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The article is very opinionated ad I don't agree with some of it, but the problem is real and we should think of how to deal with it for the future. As I see it, currently the only sure-fire way to deal with unlicensed material is to treat it as "all rights reserved", until it hits the public domain.
There are other reasonable approaches, but none universal and they sure imply a fair amount of due diligence and risk assessment. A good solution could be a universal, retroactive, default-license. Any license would do. Because it's the absence which creates the uncertainty, the traps and the variable interpretations all over the world. Yet, while this would be very useful, I don't see it happening anytime soon... So, what we can do in the meantime? We could gently ask authors to choose a license for their unlicensed artifacts whenever we stumble upon one. — Which I already do, with a few gratifying successes, if I must say myself. :) Also, many code-repositories are already helping the problem by pushing for the choice of a license at the creation of new projects, but we all need to push more. Lobbying the code-repos to progressively give stronger nudges to the existing unlicensed stuff, which is indeed the more difficult to address otherwise... |