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I do understand your viewpoints. I just disagree that they're significant enough in practice to outweigh the value I see in WTFPL. The lack of a warranty discl
by Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
I do understand your viewpoints. I just disagree that they're significant enough in practice to outweigh the value I see in WTFPL.
The lack of a warranty disclaimer isn't an issue in practice; my readme just says "WTFPL, no warranty". The vague rights grant isn't something I've seen as an issue in analogous situations in case law.
More important, to me, is what WTFPL says about my code: I'm not precious about it, I give it to you, I trust you to go do amazing things with it. It is a very humble licence. It says life is too short to get precious about licence wankery. Plus there's the side-effect that small companies and artisan developers can use it, while behemoths like Google won't. These, in my view, are all to the good.
I don't expect you to share that view, but for these reasons, WTFPL is a "good licence" for me. OpenStreetMap thrived for years with a WTFPL-licensed editor (I wrote/maintained it). No-one died, no-one got sued, and OSM became one of only four worldwide geodatabases. The main reason the current editing software isn't WTFPL (I started it but handed over to more talented developers pretty quickly) is that Intel wanted to use it, went "WTF WTFPL", and asked the new maintainer to change it. He did, but tagged the next release idiot-intel-lawyers. I laughed.
(IANAL, though I have spent way too much time over the past 15 years studying licenses and their applicability across different jurisdictions, again principally in connection with OSM and with its - very successful - licence change.)
- putlake 8y agoWhy not just release it into the public domain then?
- Doctor_Fegg 8y agoMany countries don't have the US concept of public domain, including the one where I live ("in the public domain" actually means something quite different in British English). But the WTFPL also makes a statement and one of which I approve.
- wongarsu 8y agopublic domain is indeed a bad idea, but CC0 is a great equivalent that works worldwide
- DannyBee 8y ago"The lack of a warranty disclaimer isn't an issue in practice;" There have in fact been developers sued (and they lost!) over this very issue in analogous situations, so i'm not sure why you say this. "my readme just says "WTFPL, no warranty". The vague rights grant isn't something I've seen as an issue in analogous situations in case law." I'm not sure where you looked. Judges have varied wildly in what they have done in analogous situations. We are nothing if not data driven. If we didn't have very good data that suggests it is an issue, we wouldn't care.
- Doctor_Fegg 8y agoIf you could share some of that data, that would be helpful.