update Github search link

[simonhaenisch]

The Github search now has a feature to search for repositories with a certain license type.

~I furthermore suggest to update this paragraph:~

~You would traditionally put the above statement into a file named COPYING or LICENSE. However, to explicitly distance yourself from the whole concept of copyright licensing, we recommend that you put your unlicensing statement in a file named UNLICENSE. Doing so also means that your project can more easily be found on e.g. GitHub or Bitbucket, enabling others to reuse your code in their own unencumbered public domain projects.~

~I'm not sure whether Github would be able to auto-detect the license type as "Unlicense" if the file is not called license/license.md. If you want me to update that as well, you can just let me know before merging this and I'll make a suggestion :nerd_face:~

[bhuga]

I'm not sure whether Github would be able to auto-detect the license type as "Unlicense" if the file is not called license/license.md

GitHub detects this correctly, and no change is required. On the backend, it's powered by https://github.com/benbalter/licensee, and you can see in https://github.com/benbalter/licensee/blob/f771afa55f8fecbb838ec3045153c03e74efc769/docs/what-we-look-at.md that a file called UNLICENSE is correctly detected.

I'd vote to update the search link in any case.

[simonhaenisch]

Ok thanks for that @bhuga... then yes, just the link needs updating, as the current one gives me this:

[Hexstream]

UNLICENSE file definitely works for detection, note that the last line of the Unlicense which was previously "optional" is now required for proper detection on GitHub:

For more information, please refer to <http://unlicense.org/>

(And it's better to use https, for some reason that's not yet updated on the site.)

(Compare proper detection with last line VS not detected without last line.)

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edit: So unfortunately, a direct license search for Unlicense on GitHub is likely to underestimate the popularity of this license for quite some time, assuming many people were omitting the last "optional" line and have not yet added it back.

[simonhaenisch]

a direct license search for Unlicense on GitHub is likely to underestimate the popularity of this license for quite some time

Well, it's still a lot more accurate (112k results) than a link that tells you the search was invalid... or using path:unlicense unlicense in the Github search, which gives only 3 results. So I suggest you update the link? Otherwise just close the PR, please (:

[mlinksva]

@simonhaenisch FWIW filename: works better than path: -- https://github.com/search?q=filename%3Aunlicense+unlicense&type=Code (11k results) but of course license:unclicense works even better. 😄