Hi,

in the preparation of a small adjustment mod to Nullius I was looking into The Unlicense, especially related to whether or not I would be able to include a Nullius folder into the Git project alongside the adjustment mod that would be hosted on GitHub under the MIT License.

When doing so, I found several issues with The Unlicense, e.g. the term public domain not being applicable in all places, national legislation rendering the license inapplicable in some countries, resulting in the software being treated as if it was not licensed at all, thereby putting people using and/or releasing original or derivate versions of Nullius in a situation of license violation and possibly even copyright infringement.

While The Free Software Foundation suggests to use CC0 instead, personally, I'd recommend the MIT License for its simplicity and (as far as I can tell) wider use.

For your convenience, you can compare the licenses here:
- The Unlicense (on choosealicense.com)
- MIT License (on choosealicense.com)
- Both at a glance (scroll down on choosealicense.com)

If the MIT License's requirement to include the original copyright notice as well as the license text itself in all copies of the software bothers you, MIT No Attribution will solve that.
While the scope of MIT No Attribution is exactly that of The Unlicense (without running into all of The Unlicense's issues), I would still suggest to use the more widely used MIT License. More widely used licenses lower the hesitation and insecurity of new programmers picking up on a project, and the attribution for your awesome work is well deserved. ;)

For the record:
While I've sunken countless hours into researching licenses, both for private and work projects, the following applies:
- IANAL (I am not a lawyer)
- TINLA (This is not legal advice)
You can find out more about those terms on this wikipedia entry

with kind regards
Merikolus

For anyone who might have read already, I've done a few updates to the text, hopefully improving readability (English is not my first language) and adding a few links for those who want to dive into this topic more deeply.

I've changed it to MIT No Attribution for the next update. I have very little concern about licensing issues for this mod, because it doesn't have significant graphical assets, the code is not useful for anything but a Factorio mod, and Factorio mods are essentially impossible to monetize. If there's anything of value that anyone can reuse from this mod then that's fine.

Thanks a lot. You are right with what you say. We still prefer to not violate any license terms. This change will enable a more structured way of work for us, versioning Nullius in the same Git Repo on a separate branch alongside our modifications.

<3

Also, made another update to the original post, as there was a really bad mistake!
Changed:

While The Free Software Foundation suggests to not use CC0 instead

to

While The Free Software Foundation suggests to use CC0 instead