Is there a robust way to publish work anonymously? IE, publish the work and never worry about being forced to reveal yourself as the author due to some possible dispute?
Using a very unrestrictive license like MIT or WTFPL with a pseudonym seems to be good. Even if someone else claims to be the person behind the pseudonym, that person couldn't restrict your use of the software, due to the loose license. So there wouldn't even be a need dispute their claim. Or maybe I'm missing something here. Anyways, advice would be appreciated.
Just post the code somewhere with a notice on the top of the code files:
This code was published anonymously into the public domain. Do with it as you wish.
When I share my small bug fixes and small improvements to free software, I usually contact the project maintainers and tell them that I'd like to anonymously share my small code into the public domain which means you can take ownership of it should you desire it.
>>12
You can't place things into the public domain, and it's impossible to take ownership of something actually in the public domain. All you're doing is advertising that you don't know how intellectual property works.
The ``best'' you can do is waive your copyright, with something like CC0.
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Anonymous2012-05-14 10:52
>>13
When you're anonymously publishing your own code to the world on the Internet, you're waiving copyright on that code which is effectively placing in the public domain. Sharing that code with the intent of disclaiming copyright with an organised software development group, you're effectively donating code to them. That group can choose to claim it as their own code and apply copyright to it (who would really know otherwise the source was original and anonymous) or they could possibly credit the source as anonymous and in the public.
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Anonymous2012-05-14 10:54
>>14 When you're anonymously publishing your own code to the world on the Internet, you're waiving copyright on that code which is effectively placing in the public domain. Sharing that code with the intent of disclaiming copyright with an organised software development group, you're effectively donating code to them. That group can choose to claim it as their own code and apply copyright to it (who would really know otherwise, the source was original and anonymous) or they could possibly credit the source as anonymous and in the public domain.
Fixed :(
It is better to keep the copyright, and then release it under something like WTFPL. Public domain might not mean what you want it to mean, and like >>12-san said, it isn't trivial to just release something into the public domain. And public domain might mean something different in country to country. If you keep the copyright and provide an unrestrictive license, you have the opportunity to outline the unlimited access that you want to provide.
oh, sort of. I fixed a subtle hashing bug and I'm doing OO in C, so there are a few misassignments for the vtable pointers which cause hard to trace problems. I need to add a few more instructions to make it usable, and then the ability to use constants inline in expressions rather than always having to declare them in a data section first.
Take your code, license it with the MIT license, sign the entire source file with a 4096-bit key. Note in the license that only someone who has the key and can prove it by signing another file with it can make claims about its copyright.
There you go.
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Anonymous2012-06-05 22:36
>>25
I thought about doing this. That would definitely take care of anyone claiming to be the one that submitted it. But then there's the chance that someone might claim to own the code, and that you leaked it or something. And then you'd have to somehow prove that your work was original I suppose.
>>31
I assure you, it took me longer than a weekend to write 21K lines of code. I understand that time and effort do not immediately translate to value, and lines of code do not immediately translate to maintainability and usefulness, but at least there is one more thing in this world that you could use if you wanted to. Now I just need to get it to the point where it isn't a waste of time to attempt to use it.