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“Good Luck with That” Public License

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Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#41

Post by gowld »

BFatts wrote: post #29
rectang wrote: post #10

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.)

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.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a kid. The legality of the license and the quality of the code matters, not the childishness.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#42

Post by salawat »

rectang wrote: post #10

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.)

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?

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#43

Post by aimxhaisse »

BFatts wrote: post #29
rectang wrote: post #10

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.)

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.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#44

Post by bunderbunder »

tener wrote: post #2

This: > 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 downvot…

> 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.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#45

Post by tzs »

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.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#46

Post by thewhitestguy »

BFatts wrote: post #29
rectang wrote: post #10

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.)

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.

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.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#47

Post by gkya »

salawat wrote: post #42
rectang wrote: post #10

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.)

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 d…

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.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#48

Post by ballenf »

tzs wrote: post #45

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…

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.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#49

Post by Shish2k »

eboyjr wrote: post #13
lucb1e wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe it should be more explicit: > 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

> No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner

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?

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#50

Post by evilDagmar »

gkya wrote: post #47
salawat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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 obsc…

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.

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