Unlicense text on site ends with HTTP link

[lgarron]

https://unlicense.org contains a version of the license ending in:

For more information, please refer to <http://unlicense.org/>

That line was updated in this repo 8 months ago: b946acf

It would be nice for the website to reflect that!

[corollari]

I fixed this problem in my redesign (#68) but this repo/website has been neglected for some time.

In my opinion the best course of action would be to directly remove that line from the license and let it just stand on it's own, without linking it directly with a website that can change in the future.

[Hexstream]

That would further complicate license detection.

We already had the problem that the "optional" last line of the license turned out to be required when GitHub's license detection got stricter. The recommendation thus became to add back that last line for those who had omitted it. I think it would be a bit schizophrenic to now require that the last line be removed/absent. It's not clear to me that GitHub would accept to support 2 versions of the license, one with the last line and one without.

So I think the last line of the license should probably stay.

[mlinksva]

What @Hexstream writes is true.

I would not recommend removing the line from the text published by unlicense.org but if in general that line ought be optional, https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/blob/master/src/Unlicense.xml ought wrap it with <optional>. GitHub doesn't currently use annotations in SPDX XML but I think there are some license detection/compliance tools that do.

[corollari]

What were the reasons/arguments that lead to the decision of recommending to add the last line?

[Hexstream]

Good question, see #61 (comment) for rationale.

[corollari]

@Hexstream Sorry but I don't see from the discussion in the link you provided why was that decision made.

• Why is it that suddenly github's detection required the existence of that line on licenses?
• Why was it decided to include the line instead of removing it? It seems that an standard unlicense without such line would also get properly detected by Github.

[Hexstream]

Sorry, it seems I had misunderstood your question.

I had the displeasure of stumbling upon the change one day.

See my comment here (starting at "So, we finally get to the point:") for details.

It would probably be best if GitHub respected the original intent of the license, which was that the last line was optional, but for some reason it does not.

[mlinksva]

I forgot that I wrote almost exactly the same as above in #55 (comment) 😆

It must not have sunk in to me at the time that the website had such a clear instruction.

I'll make a PR to the library that GitHub uses to detect licenses to enable it to detect Unlicense without the optional line, along the lines of licensee/licensee#253 (but simpler). No promise that the maintainer will merge it though!

[corollari]

I've just put forward a PR with the changes suggested by @mlinksva.

[kunal6673]

Remove my bug file

[mlinksva]

@artob is it possible to deploy master to wherever https://unlicense.org is hosted (the footer says dreamhost...) so that this can be closed?

FWIW, GitHub Pages supports https for custom domains since last year in case serving the site from there would be easier (well, no deploy step). It would be trivial to convert to Jekyll I think. Again, just FWIW.

[Hexstream]

The site is pending a big redesign, I think that's why it's not as well-maintained as it could be. It would be nice if this deploy could still be done in the meanwhile.

[corollari]

The redesign has been mentioned for several months now but there seems to be no progress on it.

[corollari]

Also, something relevant to the discussion may be github/choosealicense.com/pull/679. It was closed because the link is included in most versions of the unlicense on github.

[Hexstream]

The redesign has been mentioned for several months now but there seems to be no progress on it.

I'm assuming that Arto Bendiken (pinged above) is busy with other projects.