Hi CthulhusPetals, looking forward to trying out your fractal app - it looks great.
A few comments about the licensing:
Depending on which jurisdiction the respective authors reside in, "no copyright statement" does not imply "no copyrights". For example in Germany, the legal default is that the author retains all rights. Due to international treaties between Germany and, for example, the Unites States of America, a hypothetical German author could (at least in theory) uphold his rights in an American court.
This is also the case for all the 165 countries who have ratified the Berne convention. "No copyright statement" means the author holds the copyright.
Notice, that the web site may impose copyright restrictions as well. For instance, FractalForums.com, states the german copyright law applies to anything posted here:
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=impressumSo you have to ask the authors of the shader snippets for permission to use their work in your app, if they haven't stated any license. Notice that in many cases the ideas encapsulated in the code fragments could probably be rewritten quite easily in new code.
I have had a few questions from other people about the shaders included in Fragmentarium. While I did ask the authors (mostly Knighty and Kali) for permission to distribute the shaders, the authors still retain the copyright. This means that if you use any shader from Fragmentarium, you must ask the authors for permission (unless they have stated a license). The Fragmentarium code itself may be used under either GPL or LGPL. That doesn't mean I will not allow my code to be used in commercial, closed source software - you just have to get permission first.
I think all would benefit if the people posting code here attached a line stating the license. GPL/LGPL is really not well suited for for short code snippets, because of:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOmitPreamble, but I think the creative commons license might be suitable. Especially the attribution license (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) if you want to get attributed, or the public domain dedication if you don't care about attribution:
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/Finally, I agree that everyone should be allowed to choose how they license and share their works, as long as they don't break other peoples copyright. There are great examples of both closed-source fractal software (Mandelbulb 3D) and commercial software (Ultra Fractal), and obviously a place for both.