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ectoplasm | 10 years ago

"TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION" pretty clearly applies to the package accompanied by the license. I looked at the Wikipedia page and this wasn't raised as one of the objections. Do you have a link to some lawyer complaining about that? If the OSI lawyers said it's equivalent to a public domain dedication, that seems useful in countries that don't have a public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

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dpe82|10 years ago

One of the objections from the wikipedia article you mention: "Software licenses need to give a clear grant of rights to users to be effective, including the right to redistribute and create derivative works. "Do what the fuck you want to" is not a clear license of any recognized copyright rights; the effect is arguably no license at all."

And again, given the paragraph immediately preceding "TERMS AND CONDITIONS.." one could reasonably argue that the terms apply to the license itself since nothing else is mentioned.

This is essentially the argument I encountered when our company was acquired and we had to do a license audit of all of our dependencies and ended up having to change our codebase to remove a couple (fortunately small) WTFPL projects.