“Good Luck with That” Public License
github.com
github.com
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The JSON license has made a lot of lawyers a lot of money.
When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
Now, only God knows
Yeah, we figured that out when you said that this looks great for some projects. ;-)
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.