The license the author of the BrainFuck example has chosen (or made up) actually is pretty restrictive, if not immature.
Software licensing is not a joke.
The author's account on Github seems to have many projects were a license has been either made up, or adapted. Perhaps out of lack of understanding current licensing and available licenses.
If the author intends to allow anyone to use the codebase for anything, they should choose an existing license that permits this... such as the MIT, Apache, BSD licenses, etc. Making one up is not an acceptable replacement and would not hold up in court should it ever come to that. "But judge, the author said I could do 'WHAT THE FUCK I WANT'!". :(
I am the author of bfb. It started as a joke with coworkers. I still consider it a joke but I'm proud of it!
I like to use the wtfpl for simple code I wrote (like ptyproxy, a code I wrote on a sunday afternoon that I use to debug Terminology (under 2-clause BSD)). I don't expect much contributions on these projects anyway.
If you're really concerned about the license and want to use my code in one of your projects, just send me an email and we'll talk about it. Since I'm the sole author of most of that code, I am still able to put it under a 2-clause BSD license.
I do hope you're not restraining yourself from contributing to bfb because of the software license ☺
Could you please point me which licenses were made up or adapted on my repositories?
The only repository I could change is photoalbum because it might useful to someone else.
>> Can’t you change the wording? It’s inappropriate / childish / not corporate-compliant.
>
> The WTFPL lets you relicense the work under any other license.
I get that you care, but you don't seem to have a dog in this fight, so why care so much? More specifically, its always useful to say
"Hey while that license is really creative, you realize that its also not doing you any favors. Three things that you might want to watch for are warranty issues, the ability to reassign to any license means you can be barred from using your own code, and someone can reassign the copyright to themselves and then take down your site with a DMCA. That is a lot of risk to carry just to be clever with the license."
The author seems to like it the way it is and you've shined your light on the risk, hope it doesn't show up as another HN post on how evil lawyers did evil things.
I'll go ahead and feed the troll: please back up your statement that the license won't hold up in court. The site you link to has an entry for the "do what the fuck you want license v2" and there is literally no warning, and the only restriction mentioned is that a change to the license text requires a change to the license name.
So again: exactly what is the problem (beyond hand-wavy unevidenced claims about judges)?
Alupis|11 years ago
Software licensing is not a joke.
The author's account on Github seems to have many projects were a license has been either made up, or adapted. Perhaps out of lack of understanding current licensing and available licenses.
They could check this site out for some help: https://tldrlegal.com/
If the author intends to allow anyone to use the codebase for anything, they should choose an existing license that permits this... such as the MIT, Apache, BSD licenses, etc. Making one up is not an acceptable replacement and would not hold up in court should it ever come to that. "But judge, the author said I could do 'WHAT THE FUCK I WANT'!". :(
billiob|11 years ago
I do hope you're not restraining yourself from contributing to bfb because of the software license ☺
Could you please point me which licenses were made up or adapted on my repositories?
The only repository I could change is photoalbum because it might useful to someone else.
lloeki|11 years ago
[0]: http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/
dgl|11 years ago
See also GNU's site: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL Fair enough that they don't recommend it, but they believe it is GPL compatible.
tlrobinson|11 years ago
ChuckMcM|11 years ago
"Hey while that license is really creative, you realize that its also not doing you any favors. Three things that you might want to watch for are warranty issues, the ability to reassign to any license means you can be barred from using your own code, and someone can reassign the copyright to themselves and then take down your site with a DMCA. That is a lot of risk to carry just to be clever with the license."
The author seems to like it the way it is and you've shined your light on the risk, hope it doesn't show up as another HN post on how evil lawyers did evil things.
sophacles|11 years ago
So again: exactly what is the problem (beyond hand-wavy unevidenced claims about judges)?
unknown|11 years ago
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