I’ve been wanting something like this for a while so I took advantage of the holidays and made this. Figured it’d be interesting to folks here; in particular because the core is a Racket application that gets distributed with a Swift/Cocoa frontend which I imagine is not very common (but highly productive!).
Prebuilt versions (and more info) are available on gumroad (for pay-what-you-want (incl. free)):
I lament adding to a comment tree that is tangential to the topic, so I’ll chime in at the top level with a “Congratulations on shipping!”
A month or two ago, I was reminded how many three-quarters-finished projects that I have begun over a long weekend, or other holiday, and which never quite crossed the finish line to a release. I don’t normally do “new year’s resolutions”, but I just might, to force myself to get some things out there.
I don’t think I have ever gotten software off of Gumroad. Is this your first time distributing with them, and what has the experience been like publishing there?
Thanks!
Yes, it is. I initially wanted to host the app on FastSpring, but I signed up and I haven’t gotten my confirmation e-mail yet and it’s been over a couple of days. The experience so far with Gumroad has been smooth. I wanted to be able to quickly put this out there and they are great for that.
and yet there’s no LICENSE other than
sounds pretty unenforceable
Worth the cost of litigating any violation?
Definitely not.
Unenforceable?
I don’t see why.
It may be terse, but that doesn’t make something unenforceable. The default copyright in the EU is to the author (@bogdan is in Romania), and the “License” section does not explicitly assign any rights to other parties. That seems pretty straightforward. It is the same in the US, and effectively the same anywhere that the US has coerced into cooperation with its IP regime.
Unless I were in China, Russia, or a handful of other places, I wouldn’t take my chances; at least not in any commercial use. IANAL, but I definitely would not rely on some friendly README text as a legal defense when the “License” section explicitly says “All rights reserved”. That phrase is normally a redundant formality (AFAIK the rights that get reserved are the same default rights of authorship), but in this case it makes the intent of the rightsholder clear.
If I were “ForkWare Industries, LLC.” and re-distributing Remember under my sketchy ForkWare macOS Productivity Bundle 2020 Edition, I am definitely in violation of the license. It is more likely a violator would be an individual home user, and not worth pursuing any legal action against (e.g. sharing a modified artifact with a family member). That does not mean their actions are not a violation of the license, or that the license is unenforceable in a technical sense, but it does make it unlikely to ever come to legal remedies, the proverbial “distinction without a difference”.
Why do you think there has to be a LICENSE file for copyright to be enforceable? In most places on the planet, having copyright over what you make is the default state. A license doesn’t change that, it just dictates the terms of how you can use (the word literally means “to be allowed”) a particular piece of software. That first snippet that you quoted does the same thing. Now, you might argue that that particular paragraph isn’t legally well-worded enough to make a compelling case, but hey, I did say “please.”
that’s basically it
It’s probably enforceable even in the US (I am not a lawyer). It’s just dangerous legally to have a license written without review of a lawyer because of the various small ways things can be misinterpreted.