Baba Yaga License | Hacker News Reader

Baba Yaga License

smallandnearlysilent.com

10 pointstodsacerdoti9 comments

Too ambiguous. The main driver behind open source’s success is largely in some way, shape, or form "profit." Saying nobody can profit by using the project essentially limits its use to strict personal-use, and even then — it depends on how deep "profit" goes, and what "profit" means.

In any case, you can say that in a clearer way.

Heh. We both said the same, here and on Lobsters. :-)

I have been speculating for over a year about a FOSS license that stipulates and specifies free use.

What I wanted to do was write one that was less absolute: take this, use it, do as thou wilt, so long as you do not accept money for it. But if you use it in such a way as to make money, you must pay us a percentage.

This is more absolute, but I approve.

You talk like you've never seen an NC license

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0

I wasn't the only one who liked it. There is now a sequel to this, by Lars Marowsky-Brée with an extra stanza by Alan Cox.

https://opensourcerer.eu/a-new-compact/index.html

I love it. The world needs more magical things and less legalese.

I also added "you can't use this to make money" in my license [1] but I was a bit more specific, and I don't think I'm quite finished with the language yet. It feels a bit too specific but also not specific at all, weird mix. Also mine is in a purposefully-unenforceable version of legalese. I really like your magical approach. I've been describing myself as a metamagical artificer for a while now. You might just inspired me to rewrite mine.

Mine goes a bit more extreme than yours though. Not only does mine disallow parasites from using my software, it also disallows abusers of every kind. Bigots too. And the state. In fact lawyers and governments are explicitly disallowed from interpreting or enforcing my license.

- [1]: [url-redacted]

This simply seems to me like a parody, and as such, I find it annoying. Was that the intention?

I was honestly never sure how much of a joke or how serious I wanted it to be. I do intend on using my own license for my own code, and those are more-or-less the terms I place on who can use my software and who can't. I don't want my stuff being used for profit or to harm people. If someone came and asked me "hey can I use your X for Y", this document is the things I'd tell them no about.

I explicitly reject legalism and fully intend on having as a condition of the license that it cannot be interpreted by legal professionals, and I fully intend on it being invalid in a court of law, and I fully intend on never trying to enforce it.

Those are "serious" stances of mine, but a consequence of having those views is that I can't truly take this class of document seriously. I already knew it was useless to follow legal protocol to the letter in my license since it's inadmissible, so I thought why not have some fun with it.

A lot of the weird characters are vaguely related to the concept on that line of the license. The 3/5 symbol is the index for the anti-social-hierarchy clause. The lambda is the symbol for the recursive (infectious) license clause. The $ is the anti-money clause. And so on... Not all of them are related to something, some I couldn't find any good symbol for.

I like this. I like the style, the language, and the concept.

I wonder if it qualifies as a Free Software or open source licence?

And here I thought that this was a license that lets you send John Wick after the people who violate it ...

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