Hacker News Reader

Comment by zuck9 | Hacker News Reader

No one pointed out that it has a do-whatever-you-want license. This is the thing which bothers me most. There are gazillions of shitty youtube downloaders (paid, free and adware supported) out there that people still use and the code is being powered by the work of open source developers.

View on HN

I don't think the license would change anything, even if they chose something like AGPL. The sites would either ignore it (hard to prove infringement) or put a small link with their source. They don't rely on being proprietary anyway.

Well it'll atleast do something to limit creations and who knows if the copyright attribution was placed on many projects, youtube-dl would have received more attention, I'm surprised it wasn't already posted to HN.

It's very nice though for legitimate developers.

I think it's a legitimate choice. Personally I'm not worried my work is being used that way, as long as the original project is available and works.

As a stalwart defender of the WTFPL in my small circle of developer friends (who mostly think I'm crazy for it), you are now added to the list of people I can use to back up the fact that I'm not. ;)

Seriously though, awesome project, used it for a while.

Another example for you: libcaca. [1] However, the GNU people recommend the X11 license for small programs and Apache 2.0 if you've already decided to use a permissive license on a large program [2]

[1] http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca [2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL

Reply on news.ycombinator.com