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Comment by matthewaveryusa | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand this reasoning of "there's not a license" Take an existing one you like and amend whatever you want to it.

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Rolling your own license isn't trivial. You could end up with something that nobody wants to touch because the legal implications are unclear, or something that's unenforceable, or both.

Somewhat relevant: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...

IIRC the GPL, for example, is itself covered by copyright and doesn't permit modification of its own text.

That is super interesting, I was actually thinking about it as I was writing that response. Isn't that non-enforceable? As in, if you write a legal document, and then make that document law, and then copyright it, it would mean that you wouldn't be able to modify the law without breaching copyright law. Is this really true and enforceable?

You can modify or add extra terms to the GPL, they even have templates: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatible...

Totem has an example https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/totem/-/blob/b4050524d6cd961b...

You're allowed to modify it as long as you make it very clear that the new license is distinct from the old one: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL

Ah, cool. It sounds like they have a specific way they want you to avoid modifying the text at the end of the paragraph about modifying it (for version 3):

> Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism offered by GPL version 3.

You cannot copyright a license.

A license is a written document, so like any other document, it is protected by copyright law. See e.g. https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/55720/is-it-legal-to... and https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4543/is-the-m...

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