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WTFPL

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64 pointssuperberliner34 comments

See also : The Romantic WTF Public License

http://danslalune.posterous.com/the-romantic-wtf-public-lice...

It's even more free than the original since the license is released under itself. Released on Valentine's day by yours truly :-)

I would say that the postscript of that license is the one thing that I consider missing from the original WTFPL. If I'm giving away my software for free without restrictions, I sure as hell don't want to get sued over it.

I find it funny that this apparently meets the Wikipedia notability standards.

Anyway, I always found it strange that anyone would choose to use this license. The concept behind it is great, but why include unnecessary profanity in the license terms? It seems like it would only make it more difficult to defend the validity of the license and any works released under the license.

What would you need to defend?

Scenario: Alice writes a program, puts it under that licence, Bob uses the program, Alice dies and her heir Eve wants to get money from Bob for using the software. Eve tries to get a court to declare the licence invalid, so that Bob has to re-licence the program under new conditions or stop using it.

Assuming that it's possible at all to declare the WTFPL invalid (why would it be?) - he can re-licence the program to a licence giving everyone exactly the same rights. It is allowed by WTFPL.

Bob is not the copyright owner. He can't re-licence it to anything.

What he can do is re-license a right to use the program, under terms specified by the copyright owner.

I've attached extra meaning to c vs s in the word licence, but the definition you used is not the same as parent.

Yes. And if the new copyright owner Eve declares the original license invalid, Bob won't be able to re-licence (or even use the program any longer). Also Alice and Eve could be the same person who just changed her mind.

I don't think that's true. Eve can change the licence on her work. That doesn't affect any copy that Bob obtained beforehand. You cannot change the licence in a way that affects things already released - otherwise you'd be able to release something under BSD and after a year say "I'm changing the terms, new licence requires everyone to pay me X, even if you obtained the software on BSD terms".

Referring to the WTFPL author (http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/):

    Can’t you change the wording? It’s inappropriate / childish /
    not corporate-compliant.
    
    What the fuck is not clear in “DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU
    WANT TO”? If you do not like the license terms, just
    relicense the work under another license.

Yes, you can't normally do this --- as long as the license is valid. That's why you may need to defend it in court. (Eve may want the court to decide that the license never gave the right in the first place.)

Eve could do that, for sure. Nothing in the license forbids it. Declaring the license invalid and requiring users to re-license it does fall under 'what the fuck you want to' according to my interpretation of the license. But then again, I believe so does 'doing what the fuck I want to', so there's that too...

If I'm not mistaken, the GPL has had to be defended in court several times. It's a situation where someone tries to charge money for a product, but a GPL'd source code was used in the product. That particular situation doesn't apply to this license however, since you can, apparently, do whatever you want.

The GPL has nothing to do with "charging money", so no, that's never been tested in court. And in any case, in a suit regarding any distribution license, it is the copyright owner who would bring the suit, forcing the alleged infringer to "defend" the case.

Sorry - I was indeed mistaken about the "charging money" aspect of it. However, the GPL has been successfully defended in court:

http://gpl-violations.org/news/20060922-dlink-judgement_fran...

It seems to me that you would use this license if you specifically intend to spit in the eye of copyright laws in general. The use of this license burns quite a few bridges even without the profanity, but the profanity makes it a political statement in addition to a legal document.

It's notable because there's a reasonable amount of software released under it, including, for example, some software in Debian's repositories.

I provide support for my code under a "pay it forward" license. i.e. if I provide support to you and help you get my code running, then I expect you in turn to invest the time to clearly document what I showed you. This is a principle of least effort, insofar as I will provide support assuming I won't need to duplicate my work for the next guy. It also means I don't need to needlessly document things that people don't care about. This is similar to lazy coding: "throw an exception if this tricky corner-case pops up, and only if this exception trips will I go through the effort to think through correct behavior for this corner case".

http://thisscientificmethod.com/2010/02/28/this-is-an-experi...

I like this idea, but why do you link to a blog comment of yours that says exactly the same thing?

Is there any legal difference between using this license and releasing something under public domain?

In some countries there isn't a legal concept of public domain. I don't know much more than that but I think Germany may be one of them.

Yes and no.

Here in Germany (and other countries) we do have a public domain ("gemeinfrei", "gemeinfreie Werke"), but it contains only works whose authors died at least 70 years ago. It is impossible for a living person to actively put their work into the public domain.

However, this is not as bureaucratic as it may sound. You can still sign off any exploitation rights ("Verwertungsrechte")! But there are other rights you cannot sign off, the author's moral rights ("Urheberpersönlichkeitsrechte").

In general, there are two flavours of copyright law in the world:

1) The copyright which centers around the act of copying or doing other things with the creative work. This is found in the USA and Great Britain.

2) The author's rights ("Urheberrecht", "droit d'auteur") which centers around the creators. This is found in Germany and France.

One problem with the licence is that the text primarily seems to concern itself. Compare MIT licence "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software" or public domain "This ... is public domain." which explicitly tell you what is licensed.

And when you find yourself in court being sued by the original author who says "Obviously, that licence was a joke, I never meant it", good luck....

Do some Googling, but there can be liability issues with public domain if your work causes damage. There have been some significant discussions about it over the last year in terms of public domain vs GPL and BSD licenses.

I released some code under a similar license, but I just made it up on the spot: http://trailbehind.com/comment_widget/

"CommentWidget isn't released under a particular open source license. You can do whatever you like with the code, anything at all."

Isn't this a particular license in itself?

These kinds of licenses are cute, but you shouldn't use one as it just makes life harder on those that might adopt and patch back into your software. Additionally, in this case, the lack of a disclaimer of warranty in this particular cute license is ill advised.

http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ Why is there no “no warranty” clause?

The WTFPL is an all-purpose license and does not cover only computer programs; it can be used for artwork, documentation and so on. As such, it only covers copying, distribution and modification. If you want to add a no warranty clause for a program, you may use the following wording in your source code:

  /* This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to
 * the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it
 * and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want
 * To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See
 * http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING for more details. */

How does this make life harder for hackers? Explicit permission is given to do whatever the fuck [you] want to, which includes hacking.

Watch: I choose to ignore the warranty clause per clause 0. Also, since that clause exists, I can choose to apply it to other code I combine it with (unlikely, but its a dumb license that way)

Past that, I'm not convinced that due to clause 0 that it can be combined with other code, and I am of the opinion that more licenses are not good for open source development in general.

A responsible coder, given the desire in the wtfpl, would adopt a richard hipp style posture, or choose mit,bsd or apache.

I always thought this license was misnamed since it does have one restriction:

  "and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed."

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed.

Doesn't that just apply to the license document -- not the software itself?

Oh, you're right.

I would worry that this is not actually legally binding.

Why would it not be?

If your license won't hold up in court, then you might as well not bother with one. You really can't be cavalier about the langauge in your contracts.

Take the recent landmark case of Jacobsen v. Katzer -- Jacobsen nearly lost because he was using a slightly oddball open source license (the Artistic License) that was not written by a lawyer, had some ambiguous passages, and didn't quite say what he intended.

Sure, it's less of an issue with an extremely permissive license like this one, but let's imagine you aren't around any more and some company wants to use your code... but they can't because their legal department doesn't trust the license.

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