Add an open source license

[edlanglois]

I am unable to find any license associated with this code, could you add one?

[kosciak9]

Hi @keenerd, considering you don't maintain the project - absolutely no judgement here - if you add a license, then someone could fork over you script and apply patches from others, extending this pretty nice program's life.

[knghtbrd]

Unfortunately @keenerd has not been active on github at all since 2018. His last post to the Arch forum was 2016, eight years ago now. I think it's fair to suggest that he has moved on from both, and I think we may readily wish him well, wherever he is now.

I think it's relatively obvious that no legal challenges to a fork/continuation of pacmatic are likely to be forthcoming, but I could explain (and will if requested) why I believe he probably could not realistically prevail in any such challenge if he wanted to bring one now, at least without first sending a letter asking for infringement to stop. And if you forked the repo today and said you were doing so right here in this issue, it'd start a countdown to a time when a legal claim is no longer possible, at least under US law.

If you want to fork the project, I suspect something like this would more than suffice:

$mypkg is a fork/continuation of pacmatic by Kyle "keenerd" Keen. His script was offered to the general public for mutual benefit and education with no explicit license conditions or restrictions. While keenerd may or may not assert Copyright over pacmatic, contributions to $mypkg are dedicated to the Public Domain to the extent permitted by law and by keenerd in the same original spirit. Use them well, learn from them, and remember that friends don't let friends -Sy.

If keenerd comes back to the project, he might slap a CC0 declaration on it and be done. Because a random shell script doesn't have a lot of commercial value, however handy it might be, and a Copyright license only matters if you're prepared to spend money on lawyers and lawsuits to enforce it.

[Zerophase]

I'm going to fork this to fix some issues. We probably all have wrapper scripts anyways that we could add directly to pacmatic to improve functionalities. I'm guessing mostly simple stuff that a pacman hook would be too severe for.