Live data from Hacker News

“Good Luck with That” Public License

github.com

51–52 of 52 posts

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#51
post #29
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.

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.

Re: “Good Luck with That” Public License

#52
post #49
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.
Post reply on HN