A compendium of funny, and downright bad licenses | Hacker News Reader

A compendium of funny, and downright bad licenses

github.com

44 pointspolitelemon14 comments

Once upon a time I distributed some software free for anyone to use or redistribute, except for Elliotte Harold. Frankly I don't think it had the requisite originality to even qualify for copyright protection, but that didn't stop a couple of panicked publishers from reaching out for waivers and being less than 100% satisfied when I sent them signed, snail mail letters attesting to my belief that it lacked requisite originality. (The Zen InterSLIP dialing script.)

What did Elliotte Harold do to you?

They're the creator of XML, so probably a net negative for humanity. (I kid, I kid)

The “Anyone But Richard Stallman License” is pretty funny. Not only he’s the only one who has to care/respect the license… he’s also the only one who would do so in the first place

> The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Maybe an urban legend but I believe a big player had to explicitly ask for the permission of using the software for Evil since they were redistributing it and could not guarantee that the final users would use it for Good.

Not a legend at all. It's actually confirmed by the author of jslint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCimLnIsDA

Violating Rick Bennett's 1985 Soulcatcher license delivered you into the hands of a smoking, blood-drenched apparition with fangs (SBDAWF)

https://web.archive.org/web/20231026223905/https://ns1.spudd...

The Human Virtual Machine License is missing? Basically, any instance of the license coming to effect (a execution) would try to use the license taker to execute a behaviour program and ammend his suggestions to the license. The one i saw in the wild tried to make me steal paperclips, for whatever reason.

These are funny and also terrifying.

But oh boy, I hope my new licenses [1] won't end up on this list.

(They're not done yet; please wait until then at least!)

[1]: https://yzena.com/licenses/

I like the "No Duty" clause.

Of course, it begs the question if such a clause remains open source (as it will effectively discriminate based on country). But defending open source developers in a hostile environment should take precedence over cooperation.

It's just unfortunate that such measures seem necessary (looks at the EU's CRA).

Yes, you are right. The CRA plus the Bitcoin lawsuits in the UK are the reason that exists.

Is one of these the hilarious license preventing use by ICE (the US govt agency) that someone unilaterally applied to a large work with multiple copyright holders? Okay the license wasn't that funny but the situation was.

That's perfect! I am gonna use the "DON'T BE A DICK PUBLIC LICENSE" for my next pet project, maybe adding a clause about AI ingestion.

> A compendium of funny, and downright bad licenses

Will be nice to point also to the software which has those licences.

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