> 0. You just DO WHAT THE F*CK YOU WANT TO as long as you NEVER LEAVE A
TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product.
may be in fact quite tricky to ensure: unless you do an (potentially expensive) audit of the code and all potential binary assets within you will never be sure.
To see how difficult it is to erase all traces: see how the state-backed hacking groups keep getting traced.
EDIT:
Why the downvotes? Yeah I know this is a joke license, but to a lawyer no license is a joke, and to use something in a corporate environment you really need to have one on board.
> Yeah I know this is a joke license, but to a lawyer no license is a joke, and to use something in a corporate environment you really need to have one on board.
For the kind of projects this license is ostensibly meant for, I think that it's most resonable to regard "no sensible lawyer would ever OK this" as a feature rather than a bug.
I am not a lawyer, but many may feel more comfortable if it included something like the following about having no implied warranties:
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
Also, how can users "NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product" if the author's full name and date of creation is meant to be included in the license?
> how can users "NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product" if the author's full name and date of creation is meant to be included in the license?
Basically yes. Thinking as a lawyer though you don't want to leave interpretation of "trace or track" to a judge. In the rare case that there is a dispute, it opens it up for ambiguities which increase risk.
There's a long tradition of licenses with a rebellious spirit, either deliberately or incidentally drafted in such a way that makes them hard to interpret. Before this "GLWTPL" there was the WTFPL, the JSON license, etc.
People who choose such a license should be aware that they are making downstream adoption of their product more difficult. (For some authors that is surely the point.)
Serious answer: Most companies big enough to care about this sort of thing have a list of approved open source licenses, which their lawyers have read and decided they're ok with. Using a license not on that list means you need to talk to the lawyers. That usually takes a few days of back and forth emails.
Complying with the letter of an ambiguously drafted license is quite challenging, but it's important if you are an entity with a lot of assets and thus a plump target for a lawsuit.
The JSON license has made a lot of lawyers a lot of money.
Our company has, in its policy, the allowance of licenses that fall into the OSI spec. This license, along with the WTFPL, are patently denied due to their joke licenses.
Regardless of how amazing your code is, you look like a kid when you need to tag your code with one of these joke licenses. It loses a ton of credibility in the corporate world where open source is taken very seriously.
That's why I find the WTFPL a bit misleading, I tend to prefer the official french version of it (LPRAB -> http://sam.zoy.org/lprab/) ; the main point of this one is the "j’en ai RIEN À BRANLER." part, i.e, "I don't care at all".
It leaves little room to potential ambiguities regarding whether or not you should expect the author to care about concerns like, looking like a kid.
Oh no! Some people, serving a corporation, who would leverage someone's work in their business processes to a profit without compensating the author of the work, have an opinion, which they take very seriously, on the manner in which the author of the work should license the free work so that they can legally use that free work in the manner l that works best for them!?!?! :O
Ya'll get so lost in the process of exploitation that you forget you're actually exploiting people.
Perhaps they would do well to realize that if someone uses a "joke licence" they are implicitly stating that the code in question, according to their personal standards, probably isn't suitable for production environments. In some offices however, this same code might be viewed as worth trying to build a blockchain currency system with. Coughcough*
Programmers write things all the time that they wouldn't inflict on anyone else. They're written to get a one-time thing done and no more than that, however, they do sometimes realize that someone else might be facing that very same one-time problem, so there's no harm in at least letting other people play with said abomination.
The entire point of the license is to highlight how ridiculous it is that one should have to be/retain a lawyer in the process of generating sequences of 0's and 1's to run on a computer.
Programming is mathematics. You stop doing things like trying to 'license' 2+2 on x86, and we'll stop making goofy licenses to mess with you and give your lawyer a heart attack.
We all know if you see something you really like but don't like the licensing of, you'll just rewrite it differently, and slap All Rights Reserved on it anyway. Thus is the joy of the Turing Machine. What you do can be redone in an infinitude of different ways. You insisting on licensing schemes just holds back code from being utilized, and builds legal structures through which software writers and users can be abused.
I've recently thought of creating a TTCACOI (Take This Code And Choke On It) license as of late.
I mean, clearly if forced binding arbitration can force you to relinquish civil rights through Contract law, one should be able to compel auto-esophegeal blockage through licensing terms right?
These licences, if they have a point, fail big time on making them. There is a copyright law out there, and source code, being copyrighted product, needs to be licenced appropriately if you want to share it. If you want the copyright law changed or abandoned, which I personally do, well, inform people about it and do some activism maybe. These ridiculous "licences" do not inform people of anything, and also they obscure the reusability of the product.
In this case the point of the licence is that the original author knows they have done something terrible and/or inadvisable (probably out of desperation), but still... The code worked once and it might be useful to someone else in a bind, but the author absolutely does not want anything to do with whatever new problem it was leveraged against, or the fallout if this time it doesn't work.
A licence is not provided with free software in order to convince you that you should use that person's code. It's provided because some people are just shirty enough to steal other people's work, claim it for themselves, and then eventually sue the original author for copyright infringement.
Another joke license... somewhat funny, but I dearly hope, no one considers using it for any code. If you think, your code should be thrown away, please don't spam hosts like Github with it. But if you don't want to throw away your code, and in my experience, most code has a value, then please publish it under one of the well-known licenses. I think it is one of the great features of Github, that on creation of a repository, it offers you to attach one of the well-known licenses to your project. This ensures that your code can be used without creating legal pitfalls and does not get lost.
Exactly... These licenses only serve to make open source management more difficult. There are plenty of licenses that are already great at making your code open, and that are already accepted across the landscape.
If you pay for your web site, feel free to do what like. With places like Github, things become a bit more complex. First of all, I assume you are not paying for those repositories. So I think it is decent to not randomly waste such a free offer. It also makes it more difficult to search for serious projects, if it is full of spam.
On the other side, in my experience, there is almost no code, which is so silly that it is useless. Quite the contrary, a lot of my best code pieces started with some sillines. It is sad, if code, which the creator made the effor to upload, is wasted, because of a poor license choices.
Another silly license just to include the word "f*ck". These are pointless and only server to confuse open source development. These are so much more appropriate for the FSF because of their intent with software.
I'm not sure if you meant he took the license itself or the joke in the readme.
If the license, then he was requested to remove attribution.
If the quote, then I'd like to know how Karl Weierstrass managed to snag the username disintegore more than a century before the introduction of the site.
OT: has anyone tried licensing a program as a whole using a different license than the individual components of the program?
If I ever release something that is large, I've considered licensing each function and class separately using a BSD license, but licensing the program as a whole as a compilation using a GPL license.
The idea is that if someone wants to just take a handful of useful things from my program, such as my configuration file parser, a sales/VAT tax calculation routine that supports the rounding modes of several jurisdictions, or things like that, they can do so regardless of how they are licensing their code. They can have the relatively low level building blocks.
If they are building something that fills the same niche as my program, however, they have to be careful. For example, if we are both doing word processors and they take my whole text processing engine (which consists of dozens of individual components), then they really need to think twice if their program is not GPL. Even though every function they have taken is available under BSD, they have also taken the selection and arrangement of the functions, which is covered by my compilation copyright.
Depends on local laws. In the US, it's very tough to protect compilations of otherwise public facts.
The real answer, however, is that if you had the funds and it made good financial sense to challenge and pursue them, your whole perspective on the affair would change. Litigating such a messy case would be very, very expensive (again, in the US at least).
One goal in licensing is to think about "how do I make violations clearcut and cheaper to enforce?" Your approach might require proving how they compiled their code together -- i.e., was it just coincidence that the two ended up looking similar? What if they coded their own VAT tax code but used every other piece of your code? Would that be enough to get around the GPL license? Just a couple examples of why such litigation would be so complex and expensive. You generally don't want to have to get into motives and process -- if you can't look at the two codebases and decide the case, it will be messy.
I'd just keep more of your code proprietary and only permissively license the stuff with very broad appeal.
51 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 91.6 ms ] thread> 0. You just DO WHAT THE F*CK YOU WANT TO as long as you NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product.
may be in fact quite tricky to ensure: unless you do an (potentially expensive) audit of the code and all potential binary assets within you will never be sure.
To see how difficult it is to erase all traces: see how the state-backed hacking groups keep getting traced.
EDIT:
Why the downvotes? Yeah I know this is a joke license, but to a lawyer no license is a joke, and to use something in a corporate environment you really need to have one on board.
I don't think it's possible to comply with this license because the license text itself will already contain enough information to track the author.
In fact, it explicitly states you have to get it out of there.
For the kind of projects this license is ostensibly meant for, I think that it's most resonable to regard "no sensible lawyer would ever OK this" as a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah, we figured that out when you said that this looks great for some projects. ;-)
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
Also, how can users "NEVER LEAVE A TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product" if the author's full name and date of creation is meant to be included in the license?
By changing the license file.
> No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202
If the copyright holder is explicitly telling the user to remove all trace of them, that seems like they are granting the authority to do so, no?
Either you say fuck or you don't.
People who choose such a license should be aware that they are making downstream adoption of their product more difficult. (For some authors that is surely the point.)
The JSON license has made a lot of lawyers a lot of money.
Regardless of how amazing your code is, you look like a kid when you need to tag your code with one of these joke licenses. It loses a ton of credibility in the corporate world where open source is taken very seriously.
It leaves little room to potential ambiguities regarding whether or not you should expect the author to care about concerns like, looking like a kid.
Ya'll get so lost in the process of exploitation that you forget you're actually exploiting people.
Programmers write things all the time that they wouldn't inflict on anyone else. They're written to get a one-time thing done and no more than that, however, they do sometimes realize that someone else might be facing that very same one-time problem, so there's no harm in at least letting other people play with said abomination.
Programming is mathematics. You stop doing things like trying to 'license' 2+2 on x86, and we'll stop making goofy licenses to mess with you and give your lawyer a heart attack.
We all know if you see something you really like but don't like the licensing of, you'll just rewrite it differently, and slap All Rights Reserved on it anyway. Thus is the joy of the Turing Machine. What you do can be redone in an infinitude of different ways. You insisting on licensing schemes just holds back code from being utilized, and builds legal structures through which software writers and users can be abused.
I've recently thought of creating a TTCACOI (Take This Code And Choke On It) license as of late.
I mean, clearly if forced binding arbitration can force you to relinquish civil rights through Contract law, one should be able to compel auto-esophegeal blockage through licensing terms right?
A licence is not provided with free software in order to convince you that you should use that person's code. It's provided because some people are just shirty enough to steal other people's work, claim it for themselves, and then eventually sue the original author for copyright infringement.
Stop making new, stupid licenses. https://www.opensource.org
Plenty of good licenses there.
Is this recent? I can't remember being able to do it last time I created a project, which was a few years ago.
Huh? A GitHub repository is akin to a personal website. Why shouldn't people put their personal doodles, experiments, and silliness on it?
On the other side, in my experience, there is almost no code, which is so silly that it is useless. Quite the contrary, a lot of my best code pieces started with some sillines. It is sad, if code, which the creator made the effor to upload, is wasted, because of a poor license choices.
If the license, then he was requested to remove attribution.
If the quote, then I'd like to know how Karl Weierstrass managed to snag the username disintegore more than a century before the introduction of the site.
If I ever release something that is large, I've considered licensing each function and class separately using a BSD license, but licensing the program as a whole as a compilation using a GPL license.
The idea is that if someone wants to just take a handful of useful things from my program, such as my configuration file parser, a sales/VAT tax calculation routine that supports the rounding modes of several jurisdictions, or things like that, they can do so regardless of how they are licensing their code. They can have the relatively low level building blocks.
If they are building something that fills the same niche as my program, however, they have to be careful. For example, if we are both doing word processors and they take my whole text processing engine (which consists of dozens of individual components), then they really need to think twice if their program is not GPL. Even though every function they have taken is available under BSD, they have also taken the selection and arrangement of the functions, which is covered by my compilation copyright.
The real answer, however, is that if you had the funds and it made good financial sense to challenge and pursue them, your whole perspective on the affair would change. Litigating such a messy case would be very, very expensive (again, in the US at least).
One goal in licensing is to think about "how do I make violations clearcut and cheaper to enforce?" Your approach might require proving how they compiled their code together -- i.e., was it just coincidence that the two ended up looking similar? What if they coded their own VAT tax code but used every other piece of your code? Would that be enough to get around the GPL license? Just a couple examples of why such litigation would be so complex and expensive. You generally don't want to have to get into motives and process -- if you can't look at the two codebases and decide the case, it will be messy.
I'd just keep more of your code proprietary and only permissively license the stuff with very broad appeal.