Romu – Fine random number generators

Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by dchest on Saturday February 29, 2020 @07:56AM (#22450309)

  // Romu generators, by Mark Overton, 2020-2-7.
  //
  // This code is not copyrighted and comes with no warranty of any kind, so it is   as-is.
  // You are free to modify and/or distribute it as you wish. You are only required   to give
  // credit where credit is due by:
  // (1) not renaming a generator having an unmodified algorithm and constants;
  // (2) prefixing the name of a generator having a modified algorithm or constants with "Romu";
  // (3) attributing the original invention to Mark Overton.

So, is it copyrighted or not? If not, then you can't require credit as described. Also, it's the first time I see a license that dictates how I should name my variables.

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by scrollaway on Saturday February 29, 2020 @09:18AM (#22450658)

Schroedinger's license. It's both copyrighted and not, and you won't know until a court decides.

The more likely outcome though is that it's copyrighted, because things just are copyrighted unless very clearly stating otherwise. CC0 needs three pages to explain just how "not copyrighted" the associated work is.

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by seemslegit on Saturday February 29, 2020 @11:21AM (#22451291)

"This code is not copyrighted" sure sounds like it is clearly stating otherwise

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by moreira on Saturday February 29, 2020 @11:24AM (#22451310)

But then the author makes demands, which they could only make if it -was- copyrighted. So it does seem like it’d be up to a court to decide.

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by admax88q on Saturday February 29, 2020 @10:16AM (#22450937)

God I wish programmers would atop trying to reinvent copyright law. The FSF has done a ton of work examining copyright law in various jurisdictions. Many places have no notion of "public domain"

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by MarkOverton on Sunday March 01, 2020 @01:12AM (#22455419)

I'm easy-going about this. I want anybody to be able to copy and modify the code, but not claim credit for inventing it. - Mark Overton

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by cyphar on Sunday March 01, 2020 @04:07AM (#22455939)

All copyright licenses (except CC0) require attribution for the work in all copies (verbatim and derivative). Please just use something like MIT, BSD, or Apache-2.0 (or the GPL family if that's your preference) which have clearly understood legal language and are known free software licenses.

Personally I would never use or depend on code that has a license its author wrote themselves. It's just too risky and other people will be less inclined to use whatever project I wrote that uses the weirdly-licensed code.

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by MarkOverton on Monday March 02, 2020 @02:18AM (#22462365)

I've changed the license to Apache version 2.0. Thanks for suggesting it!

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by dchest on Monday March 02, 2020 @03:44AM (#22462732)

Thank you!

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by earenndil on Sunday March 01, 2020 @09:05PM (#22460978)

> All copyright licenses (except CC0) require attribution for the work in all copies (verbatim and derivative)

Boost licence

Unlicense

WTFPL

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Re:Romu – Fine random number generators by cyphar on Monday March 02, 2020 @03:19AM (#22462621)

Boost requires attribution in the source form (you can't remove the copyright notice from the source repo when redistributing). The second paragraph of the license:

> The copyright notices in the Software and this entire statement, including the above license grant, this restriction and the following disclaimer, must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and all derivative works of the Software, unless such copies or derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor.

It's similar to MIT or Apache-2.0 in that respect. As for Unlicensed and WTFPL, sure they're both effectively the same as CC0 (though I would personally be cautious about removing copyright notices from a WTFPL codebase).

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