WTFPL – Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License | Hacker News Reader

WTFPL – Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License

wtfpl.net

19 pointsjohnnyhead29 comments

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If you're interested in doing this sort of thing in a way that's socially acceptable, have a look at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

It provides a way to release rights in a way that isn't subject to the legal quagmire of "public domain", and isn't subject to tonal criticisms of WTFPL.

There's also http://unlicense.org/

And also the FemSFPL: https://github.com/Feminist-Software-Foundation/C-plus-Equal...

I am not a lawyer but like the new no evil license clause Doug Crawford put on various packages this I'm not sure that "do what the fuck you want" is particularly meaningful in a legal context. You know people have been saying "don't roll your own crypto" lately?

Don't write your own license.

Don't write your own contracts.

Don't write your own legal documents.

There are plenty of solid, well written and unambiguous licenses out there that one can use to offer your users the same freedoms without the WTF.

I was skeptical of this as well; I had the FSF licensing team confirm that the WTFPL is a free software license a month or two ago. You can see it here:

https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL

From Joshua Gay:

> Our interpretation of this license is that it is > intended to allow you to do whatever you want with the > work. Therefore, we assume that this includes using, > copying, modifying, and distributing modifications for any > purpose.

He was, however, cautious to say "I can not conjecture how a court would interpret that phrase" and recommended to consult a lawyer.

It's a sad world we live in if the rights you give for a software work are opt-in (you may do this and that) and not opt-out (you may not do this and that)

> I am not a lawyer but like the new no evil license clause Doug Crawford put on various packages

That clause is a massive pain, particularly for Linux distributions. It makes the license no longer Open Source. Please do not propagate that license or clause any further.

This isn't exactly news...

pulls out soap box The WTFPL is great, though. It's a shame not more people use it. It seems to me that for truly free speech, restrictive licenses need to be abandoned, even if it's at the sake of a content donor's money (traditional copyright) or fame (copyright and copyleft). There are a lot of good arguments for the copyfree movement, in general. If we see freedom as being the absence of limitations, licenses like the WTFPL can really be considered the most free, and general arguments for free software can be applied appropriately.

And, as we've seen with the advent of unauthorized content distribution networks, people will treat work of merit as if it's licensed WTFPL anyway, whether the author/s like/s it or not. Rejecting confusing license terms makes it easier for projects to thrive in the open source community as well. It really confounds me how RMS can reject DRM but be so supportive of his own freedom-limiting psychological DRM of sorts.

Here's a list -- http://copyfree.org/licenses/ -- of these sorts of licenses, and a good, slightly more serious introduction to the public domain/copyfree/WTFPL movement in general, for those interested.

I've wondered before - what's the difference between WTFPL and just releasing something into the public domain? The name-change bit seems to relate to the license itself, rather than the licensed work.

The problem is that there is no such thing as a universally agreed upon concept of public domain. If you actually care about licensing and want your project to globally and legally be in something like the public domain, in the US sense, then you're going to have to use something like the creative commons CC0 license.

Of course if you don't really care all that much about the details of international copyright law and just think it's cool to swear on the internet then the WTFPL will be fine.

The thing is, there is no universal notion of public domain. For instance, you could say that a work in the public domain belongs to no-one and/or everyone... but in France (and, as I juste learned, in the rest of Europe as well [0]) there is this thing that says that the creator of a work will always have paternity on it, forever.

I think most people have the same notion though, but as you know law is not just about notions, it's about hardcoding what's ok and what's not. This is actually what the CC0 tries to "solve": if there is no notion of public domain in the country you live in, then you apply the terms of the license, which happen to be what "public domain" would be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#In_Europe

people will treat work of merit as if it's licensed WTFPL anyway

People will punch others in the face outside bars on Friday nights too, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable, even if it's hard to prosecute universally.

Some content creators (OK, let's be honest: an awful lot of content creators) would rather their work isn't used by the other side's political party, or by XYZ bigoted group, or by Megacorp in their advertising campaign. If you don't want to release all rights to a creative work, you don't have to. There are legal protections available to content creators right now, so there is still a justifiable benefit in retaining some rights, regardless of any arguments about licence-ignoring personal use and interpersonal distribution.

Is is possible to release software with a licence, which prohibits it's use for religious entities?

Of course -- you can release software with a license that requires the recipient to abstain from wearing pink shirts if you want[0].

That license would be non-FSF-Free and wouldn't meet the OSI definition of Open Source, though, as both groups see the benefit of allowing anyone to use the software. The OSI lists the criteria[1] as "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" and "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor".

Therefore, while possible, it might not be particularly useful to do that. You also need to consider the implications of combining your software with software released under a differently-permissive license -- you could quickly get into a position where your software can't be distributed at all without violating at least one of the licenses that apply.

Also note that I Am Not A Lawyer and I'm sure there's a jurisdiction somewhere which would read your license in a different way to that which is intended, or would strike out parts of it altogether, ending up with either a more permissive or a less permissive license than you'd intended.

[0]: I am currently wearing a pink shirt. Please don't sue me. [1]: http://opensource.org/osd

> It really confounds me how RMS can reject DRM but be so supportive of his own freedom-limiting psychological DRM of sorts.

I think you are unfair by calling copyleft licenses "DRM of sorts". Copyleft licenses voluntarily make a compromise: they chose to lessen the freedom of individuals to grow the freedom of the group/community. You may or may not agree with that, but you have to recognize that such trade-offs are necessary to organize a society. A clear example is the law which forbid one to kill someone else: at the individual level, they deprive you of the right to kill people, but at the same time they increase the freedom of the society as a whole. DRM are not the same: at no points they benefit to the people who are restricted by them.

I would call copyfree licences more permissives and copyleft licences more restrictives. But I would not call copyfree licences more free than copyleft licences. I would do the opposite. Maybe this says that I value the freedom of the society more than the freedom of individuals, because I do not believe at all that the freedom of the society is the mere sum of the freedom of the individuals who compose it.

It is not appropriate to compare DRM---a concept that exists to prevent studying and sharing---with a movement designed to ensure exactly that.

See <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html>.

Snippet from <http://mikegerwitz.com/2013/08/FreeBSD-Clang-and-GCC-Copylef...:

----

Copyleft is important[7] because it ensures that all users will forever have the four fundamental freedoms associated with Free Software[6]. The GPL incorporates copyleft; BSD licenses do not. Consider why this is a problem: Imagine some software Foo licensed under the Modified BSD license[10]. Foo is free software; it is licensed under a free software license (Modified BSD).[5] Now consider that someone makes a fork—a derivative—of Foo, which we will call “Foobar”. Since the Modified BSD license is not copyleft[10], the author of Foobar decides that he or she does not wish to release its source code; this is perfectly compliant with the Modified BSD license, as it does not require that source code be distributed with a binary (it only requires—via its second clause[10]—that the copyright notice, list of conditions and disclaimer be provided).

The author has just taken Foo and made it proprietary.

The FreeBSD community is okay with this; the free software community is not[4]. There is a distinction between these two parties: When critics of copyleft state that they believe the GPL is “less free” than more permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses, they are taking into consideration the freedoms of developers and distributors; the GPL, on the other hand, explicirly restricts these parties' rights in order to protect the users because those parties are precisely those that seek to restrict the users' freedoms; we cannot provide such freedoms to developers and distributors without sacrificing the rights of the vulnerable users who generally do not have the skills to protect themselves from being taken advantage of.[13] Free software advocates have exclusive, unwaivering loyalty to users.

> The author has just taken Foo and made it proprietary.

No, they have made Foobar, a proprietary derivative of Foo. This does not change the license of Foo or cause it to cease to exist.

I think you're getting your terms confused.

> If we see freedom as being the absence of limitations, licenses like the WTFPL can really be considered the most free, and general arguments for free software can be applied appropriately.

"Free", as defined by the FSF (and as used by those in the free software world), is a binary classification. There are four freedoms that free software must respect: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

If a license software respects all of those freedoms, it is a free license. Otherwise, it is non-free.

Note that the ability to apply additional restrictions to existing software is not one of the four freedoms.

> It really confounds me how RMS can reject DRM but be so supportive of his own freedom-limiting psychological DRM of sorts.

I assume you're referring to the GPL. Understand that the GPL is meant to be a hack of the system: it's a software license (copyright) written by a group who fundamentally believes that copyright to software (as it is currently used) should not exist[0].

The GPL is a twist of copyright law to force it to do the exact opposite of what it was intended to do: instead of restricting others' freedoms, it preserves them.

[0] The FSF does not actively oppose software copyright because doing so would harm the GPL (and therefore harm free software), but the origins of the free software movement are deeply tied to the question of whether or not software should be copyrightable at all - not so long ago, this was not an obvious question.

And yes, for those who are wondering, it is certainly possible to have free software in a world in which software is not eligible for copyright protections. The GPL is meant as a hack around the current system, as we have it now.

> "It's a shame not more people use it."

Putting aside the legal issues, I am not ever going to introduce unnecessary expletives if I want people to take my work seriously/professionally. If I do see a license like this I'll automatically assume that the author isn't taking that particular code seriously and treat it accordingly (ie may use personally but never professionally).

It's amusing and attractively concise, but I don't know if it would really be legally valid. It seems to me that there are two options. Either you want public software to remain public, in which case use a copyleft license, or you don't care whether the digital commons gets gatecrashed by proprietarians, in which case use permissive licenses such as MIT or BSD.

The only problem with that license is when someone uses it, then I make use of their code, then they sue me for copyright violation. Or my code kills someone in a hospital and the patient sues the guy who wrote the code. And they win in court because the license doesn't satisfy the requirements of the court.

Look, I wouldn't let a lawyer tell me how to write my Java code. And I won't let a non-lawyer tell me how to write a legally binding license.

(If a competent lawyer reviews this license and pronounces it good, then I retract my objection. If the license gets tested in court and wins then it gets my full support.)

Thanks mcherm, this is the best counter-argument to the WTFPL I read all day. I am myself extremely curious about what would happen in these two circumstances: 1) someone uses my work and then sues me for copyright infringment; 2) my work harms people.

Unfortunately, the legal system is intentionally designed in such a way that you can't easily satisfy your idle curiosity on that subject. You can ask a lawyer, who'll give you their best guess, but the only way to tell for sure is to get sued: there has to (with a few specialized exceptions) be an actual controversy before a court considers a question. This was (in programmer language) designed intentionally to protect scarce resources (court time) from certain kinds of denial-of-service attacks.

I chose the ISC license for both of my projects.

http://opensource.org/licenses/ISC

What would concern me about using that WTFPL license is there's no disclaimer about fitness for use/purpose, which might mean to someone "do what the fuck you want - including suing me".

Not trying to look like a scaremonger, just a personal view.

Toybox (http://landley.net/toybox/) takes an interesting approach in that they use the ISC license, minus the notice clause. (Strangely, they call call it a 2-clause BSD license, even though it really isn't, but whatever). I'm generally not a fan of license proliferation, but I do kinda like what they've done here.

And the lack of disclaimer of warranty in the WTFPL is not fear-mongering... it's a real issue, and one of the reasons we (Google) don't allow our engineers to use it.

> changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed

> 0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

Those clauses do not agree.

Funny page, but I worry some people may actually use this.

Thank you all for commenting on the topic. Reading your words just one thing seems clear to me: very few people here actually know how licenses work (me included) and what consequences could be. That's bad. Very bad.

So I can change the name twice - once there and once back? :-)

Wouldn't you be better off just releasing it to public domain? I guess it prevents you from rereleasing the software under the same name.

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