6 ms·

Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License

38 points by frostnovazzz 13y ago

angersock 13y ago
My gamedev bros use this for our libraries, and I'd love to see wider adoption of it--mostly due to the spirit of the thing. However, the number of people who come out and bawww about not picking a more widely recognized license (generally, LGPL or BSD) is disappointing; folks, if you want good licenses, you have to set an example. I implore my fellow developers to use this wherever feasible--show some guts.
- protomyth 13y ago
  To be blunt, the name is horrible and LGPL, BSD, MIT, and CC have been around long enough for folks (and not unimportantly in a lot of situations: corporate lawyers) to understand what they mean. It also doesn't look like a particularly good license if a bad actor gets me in front of a judge because they used my code and failed miserably.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Eh, I may get dragged up in front of a judge and sued one day, but I'd rather know that I did it as somebody with some chutzpah.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      Chutzpah is nice, but I like to pick causes that have a chance of being worth the hit to my family. If I really cared about the purpose of this license, I would spend time on the political side to get clear laws about placing works into the public domain.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      That will be cold comfort when you waste years of your life and probably your entire life savings because of it. "Welp, we can't buy that house we were saving up for 15 years for, because I decided i wanted to take a stand and use the WTFPL". No offense, really, but that's not chutzpah, it's stupidity.
      - evan_ 13y ago
        In what kind of a scenario would this happen?
        angersock 13y ago
        I suspect none, honestly, but it sounds scary, doesn't it? Everybody who does software would prefer a better, less legally climate, and yet few seem willing to put skin in the game. A better question is this: since we seem hellbent on not having any sort of accredited professional status, why are we surprised that this is an issue?
        DannyBee 13y ago
        You suspect none? Tell this to the java model railroad guy. A single person who never expected to be sued over open source model railroad software. He in fact, spent over 100k on the defense, AFAIK, and it did in fact cause him serious financial hardship. This is despite the fact that his lawyer (a wonderful woman) was doing the best she could to keep his costs down.
        angersock 13y ago
        This: Jacobsen v. Katzer ? You know, I was expecting to be really really sad reading that. Like, I pictured a really nice old dude with a big white bushy beard and conductor's overalls and a blue hat crying as he had to sell off his pike to pay legal fees against some overzealous corporate lawyer, only to pass away a few weeks later from diabetes (his now-grown children laying in his coffin the one train car that escaped the lawsuit-caused liquidation of assets, a reminder of better times). Instead, I found a tale of people being assholes to each other over copyright and patents and cybersquatting--further evidence that we should re-examine all those things. Again, so happy to be wrong.
        DannyBee 13y ago
        You must have read a different case than I did.
- jerf 13y ago
  Is BSD not a good license, then? Legally it seems hardly different than this license (not necessarily zero, but hardly worth getting excited about), just more legalistically phrased.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    The MIT license is essentialy "do whatever the fuck you want" in legal terms: http://mit-license.org/ http://mit-license.org/
- DannyBee 13y ago
  Sorry, but please don't. The license has serious problems for developers. To start simple, first, while yeah, a judge is probably going to find you can do whatever you want, because it's not very explicit, there will be arguments over what you were allowed to do. It is entirely possible a judge will decide what is really meant is that you can do whatever reasonable thing you want to. Worse, it does not effectively disclaim liability for the software developer. He claims he doesn't want "obnoxious things", such as "reproducing a huge disclaimer that is written in all caps". The reason that all caps language is used is because of a history of court decisions and laws around what is required to effectively disclaim implied warranties. Right now, the license does not properly disclaim any implied warranties, which puts the developer at risk. Worse than this, the text block he suggests putting in text if you want to disclaim warranty (http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/ http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/) would likely be ineffective in a lot of places. I know everyone likes to think they won't get sued. But it does happen. It will wipe you out. It isn't worth taking a moral stand against a few lines of text in a source file. To answer your other point, if you want good licenses, you have to actually know what the hell you are doing. I really do understand that people want to not have to give a shit about this stuff, and have simple and clear licensing. Really. But this is not the path to accomplishing that. The legal and political world takes a long time to adapt. Things like like free and open source software will eventually be sanely handled in the law. WTFPL is not going to be anywhere in that history.
  - anon1385 13y ago
    >there will be arguments over what you were allowed to do much like the GPL then
    - SwellJoe 13y ago
      In my experience, most of the people arguing over it haven't read it (or don't understand basic copyright concepts). It's a pretty clear license...but, it gets talked about a lot by folks who misrepresent it, either willfully or out of ignorance.
  - burntsushi 13y ago
    If a warranty disclaimer from another well-vetted license were used in the WTFPL, would that solve most of the problem? (Sans the judge ruling that it's only limited to reasonable things.)
carterschonwald 13y ago
There are many other licenses that are similarly permissive, but that lawyers actually have vetted. If you ever want interesting commercial adoption of software, you need to make sure the associated ip / software licenses are solid
- burntsushi 13y ago
  Well, the FSF has approved the WTFPL as compatible with the GPL. [1] Certainly that doesn't mean it's been as vetted as the other licenses, but it counts for something IMO. [1] - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL
  - tekacs 13y ago
    You could always just dual license. ;)
- kurotek 13y ago
  Exactly. I think of legalese as a computer language. Publishing your software globally means that your license document will be run through many sepatate jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction is akin to a unique runtime interpreter. I prefer to stick with idiomatic legalese to avoid running into interpreter specific bugs :-)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tunnuz 13y ago
How is this different from an impolite MIT license? Edit: also, for the interested, there is a free e-book from O'Reilly explaining the major free software licenses http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/index.html http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/index.html
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  the main difference is that this essentially places the work in the public domain, where the MIT license means it's freely available, but the copyright is still the creator's. Also, thou have to retain the MIT license and distribute it with all subsequent works.
  - aprescott 13y ago
    I don't think this is true. MIT explicitly allows sublicensing, meaning you can essentially just change the license on any derivative. The copyright notice needs to remain, though.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Thanks for the link. I remember how much trouble I had trying to pick a license when I first released code (even though it wasn't a big project or likely to be used by many people). I think I finally made my decision through research on StackOverflow and Wikipedia. This book would have been very useful.
nefreat 13y ago
This sounds like a more care-free way to do the same thing as http://unlicense.org http://unlicense.org Personally I'd choose unlicense instead of WTFPL.
- ernesth 13y ago
  First, unlicense is a bad name for a license that is so different from no license. Second, the first sentence and the third paragraphs do not work in most of the world: you cannot put a work in the public domain, even in countries that "recognize copyright laws".
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Kiro 13y ago
Hackers care too much about licenses...
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  Not really. I mean, yes, more than the average person, but that's because code licensing helps make the world go 'round, and means we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we want to do something. It's mostly because modern copyright law really doesn't want knowledge to be shared easily, or until the author has had a good, long profit run. Or until Disney has a good long profit run with the author's work.
charlesjshort 13y ago
OMWFL Obey my will forever license. Copying or creating derivative works shall irrevocably enslave you to my will forever.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  BeerPL I'd like a beer.
iso8859-1 13y ago
It's a bad license for two reasons: One, it does not cover the case where it's not possible to place stuff in the public domain (CC0 does). Two, it's alienating some users unnecessarily. Licenses are practical, there's no reason to invent a new term for concepts that already have well-known identifiers. Put your jokes outside the license section.
- viraptor 13y ago
  Another reason not to use it would be pre-approved licences in corporations. I can use software released under many popular free licenses without issues. But something like this one forces a roundtrip through the legal department which takes days / weeks. If you want your software to be business/corporate friendly, make sure you're using something popular (and preferably not mentioning patents or special linking clauses).
- SamHocevar 13y ago
  (disclaimer: I wrote WTFPL v2) I fart on your recommendation of the CC0. Your first “reason” is totally bogus. There is no need to cover cases where it’s not possible to place stuff in the public domain, because there is no need to place stuff in the public domain. That’s a fabrication of the CC0 license and one of the reasons why the OSI does not recommend it. A license shouldn’t even mention public domain since it’s not a widely accepted concept. Your second “reason” sounds like a matter of taste to me, especially since the CC0 goes to great lengths defining new terms such as “Commons” and “Affirmer”. If there’s a joke here, it’s the CC0, in needing more than a thousand words to basically say “do what the fuck you want”. Moreover, here is a quote from the OSI about the CC0: “the Committee felt that approving such a license would set a dangerous precedent, and possibly even weaken patent infringement defenses available to users of software released under CC0”. It’s also worth noting that the WTFPL predates the CC0 by nine years. Nine years to fill a non-existing void, and they couldn’t even do it properly.
octatone2 13y ago
This may be nitpicking, but it seems rather restrictive to force renaming of the license in the case of its modification. That is not very "do what the fuck you want to" ...
dpcan 13y ago
So, if I can just do what the Fuck I want to, then can I download your code and then re-license it as proprietary and charge royalties to everyone else who is just doing what the fuck they want to with it? I mean - I'm doing what the fuck I want to soooooo...... This is probably a stretch or something, but really, my point is that this license is so incredibly open to interpretation that I get worried about using code licensed with it every time.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  With anyone who uses your re-licensed version, yes. Not the people who aren't.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  Of course you can. Companies use MIT/BSD/Apache/etc licensed work in proprietary systems all the time, that's what they are for. You're better off using one of those since they leave no room for confusion.
otikik 13y ago
I use MIT for this. Already well known, stablished, and has the same effect. It is also less offensive to people who get offended by words. That can be an advantage or a detriment; it depends on you.
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  Exactly, the MIT license is my favorite out of all of theme. Apache, BSD, CC, etc - needlessly complicated and full of lawyer-lingo. MIT speaks to me and my priorities.
deleted 13y ago
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dnautics 13y ago
I tend to do things with less legalism, with the copyheart (which is not a licence) http://copyheart.org/ http://copyheart.org/
- mjg59 13y ago
  Am I allowed to modify copyhearted material? Distribute modified versions? Perform them? Incorporate them into works that are copyrighted?
  - dnautics 13y ago
    why are you asking for permission? You've already lost. http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/23/allowed/ http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/23/allowed/
- rwmj 13y ago
  So no one can safely use your code, and you can be sued because you don't disclaim liability properly. Great idea!
  - dnautics 13y ago
    why should I have to 'disclaim liability'? Because our litigious society would like to take advantage me and sue my pants off for no real reason? Then the flaw is not in my code, is it?
    - janardanyri 13y ago
      Because those few lines of boilerplate you would have to add exist in order to make explicit your stance on issues you probably don't even know exist, and their inclusion would come at basically zero cost. Programmers of all people should appreciate that the "plain English" explanation of something is often sorely lacking in comparison to a full and complete implementation.
      - dnautics 13y ago
pygy_ 13y ago
See also it romantic counterpart: https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License /shameless plug
hkmurakami 13y ago
wow didn't know this was fsf approved. the in-your-face-ness of the name makes it a great tool for talking about copyright with someone and making a point.

38 points by frostnovazzz 13y ago

My gamedev bros use this for our libraries, and I'd love to see wider adoption of it--mostly due to the spirit of the thing. However, the number of people who come out and bawww about not picking a more widely recognized license (generally, LGPL or BSD) is disappointing; folks, if you want good licenses, you have to set an example. I implore my fellow developers to use this wherever feasible--show some guts.

protomyth 13y ago
To be blunt, the name is horrible and LGPL, BSD, MIT, and CC have been around long enough for folks (and not unimportantly in a lot of situations: corporate lawyers) to understand what they mean. It also doesn't look like a particularly good license if a bad actor gets me in front of a judge because they used my code and failed miserably.
- angersock 13y ago
  Eh, I may get dragged up in front of a judge and sued one day, but I'd rather know that I did it as somebody with some chutzpah.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    Chutzpah is nice, but I like to pick causes that have a chance of being worth the hit to my family. If I really cared about the purpose of this license, I would spend time on the political side to get clear laws about placing works into the public domain.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    That will be cold comfort when you waste years of your life and probably your entire life savings because of it. "Welp, we can't buy that house we were saving up for 15 years for, because I decided i wanted to take a stand and use the WTFPL". No offense, really, but that's not chutzpah, it's stupidity.
    - evan_ 13y ago
      In what kind of a scenario would this happen?
      - angersock 13y ago
        I suspect none, honestly, but it sounds scary, doesn't it? Everybody who does software would prefer a better, less legally climate, and yet few seem willing to put skin in the game. A better question is this: since we seem hellbent on not having any sort of accredited professional status, why are we surprised that this is an issue?
        DannyBee 13y ago
        You suspect none? Tell this to the java model railroad guy. A single person who never expected to be sued over open source model railroad software. He in fact, spent over 100k on the defense, AFAIK, and it did in fact cause him serious financial hardship. This is despite the fact that his lawyer (a wonderful woman) was doing the best she could to keep his costs down.
        angersock 13y ago
        This: Jacobsen v. Katzer ? You know, I was expecting to be really really sad reading that. Like, I pictured a really nice old dude with a big white bushy beard and conductor's overalls and a blue hat crying as he had to sell off his pike to pay legal fees against some overzealous corporate lawyer, only to pass away a few weeks later from diabetes (his now-grown children laying in his coffin the one train car that escaped the lawsuit-caused liquidation of assets, a reminder of better times). Instead, I found a tale of people being assholes to each other over copyright and patents and cybersquatting--further evidence that we should re-examine all those things. Again, so happy to be wrong.
        DannyBee 13y ago
        You must have read a different case than I did.
jerf 13y ago
Is BSD not a good license, then? Legally it seems hardly different than this license (not necessarily zero, but hardly worth getting excited about), just more legalistically phrased.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  The MIT license is essentialy "do whatever the fuck you want" in legal terms: http://mit-license.org/ http://mit-license.org/
DannyBee 13y ago
Sorry, but please don't. The license has serious problems for developers. To start simple, first, while yeah, a judge is probably going to find you can do whatever you want, because it's not very explicit, there will be arguments over what you were allowed to do. It is entirely possible a judge will decide what is really meant is that you can do whatever reasonable thing you want to. Worse, it does not effectively disclaim liability for the software developer. He claims he doesn't want "obnoxious things", such as "reproducing a huge disclaimer that is written in all caps". The reason that all caps language is used is because of a history of court decisions and laws around what is required to effectively disclaim implied warranties. Right now, the license does not properly disclaim any implied warranties, which puts the developer at risk. Worse than this, the text block he suggests putting in text if you want to disclaim warranty (http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/ http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/) would likely be ineffective in a lot of places. I know everyone likes to think they won't get sued. But it does happen. It will wipe you out. It isn't worth taking a moral stand against a few lines of text in a source file. To answer your other point, if you want good licenses, you have to actually know what the hell you are doing. I really do understand that people want to not have to give a shit about this stuff, and have simple and clear licensing. Really. But this is not the path to accomplishing that. The legal and political world takes a long time to adapt. Things like like free and open source software will eventually be sanely handled in the law. WTFPL is not going to be anywhere in that history.
- anon1385 13y ago
  >there will be arguments over what you were allowed to do much like the GPL then
  - SwellJoe 13y ago
    In my experience, most of the people arguing over it haven't read it (or don't understand basic copyright concepts). It's a pretty clear license...but, it gets talked about a lot by folks who misrepresent it, either willfully or out of ignorance.
- burntsushi 13y ago
  If a warranty disclaimer from another well-vetted license were used in the WTFPL, would that solve most of the problem? (Sans the judge ruling that it's only limited to reasonable things.)

carterschonwald 13y ago

There are many other licenses that are similarly permissive, but that lawyers actually have vetted. If you ever want interesting commercial adoption of software, you need to make sure the associated ip / software licenses are solid

burntsushi 13y ago
Well, the FSF has approved the WTFPL as compatible with the GPL. [1] Certainly that doesn't mean it's been as vetted as the other licenses, but it counts for something IMO. [1] - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL
- tekacs 13y ago
  You could always just dual license. ;)
kurotek 13y ago
Exactly. I think of legalese as a computer language. Publishing your software globally means that your license document will be run through many sepatate jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction is akin to a unique runtime interpreter. I prefer to stick with idiomatic legalese to avoid running into interpreter specific bugs :-)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tunnuz 13y ago

How is this different from an impolite MIT license? Edit: also, for the interested, there is a free e-book from O'Reilly explaining the major free software licenses http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/index.html http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/index.html

dkuntz2 13y ago
the main difference is that this essentially places the work in the public domain, where the MIT license means it's freely available, but the copyright is still the creator's. Also, thou have to retain the MIT license and distribute it with all subsequent works.
- aprescott 13y ago
  I don't think this is true. MIT explicitly allows sublicensing, meaning you can essentially just change the license on any derivative. The copyright notice needs to remain, though.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Thanks for the link. I remember how much trouble I had trying to pick a license when I first released code (even though it wasn't a big project or likely to be used by many people). I think I finally made my decision through research on StackOverflow and Wikipedia. This book would have been very useful.

nefreat 13y ago

This sounds like a more care-free way to do the same thing as http://unlicense.org http://unlicense.org Personally I'd choose unlicense instead of WTFPL.

ernesth 13y ago
First, unlicense is a bad name for a license that is so different from no license. Second, the first sentence and the third paragraphs do not work in most of the world: you cannot put a work in the public domain, even in countries that "recognize copyright laws".

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Kiro 13y ago

Hackers care too much about licenses...

dkuntz2 13y ago
Not really. I mean, yes, more than the average person, but that's because code licensing helps make the world go 'round, and means we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we want to do something. It's mostly because modern copyright law really doesn't want knowledge to be shared easily, or until the author has had a good, long profit run. Or until Disney has a good long profit run with the author's work.

charlesjshort 13y ago

OMWFL Obey my will forever license. Copying or creating derivative works shall irrevocably enslave you to my will forever.

brokenparser 13y ago
BeerPL I'd like a beer.

iso8859-1 13y ago

It's a bad license for two reasons: One, it does not cover the case where it's not possible to place stuff in the public domain (CC0 does). Two, it's alienating some users unnecessarily. Licenses are practical, there's no reason to invent a new term for concepts that already have well-known identifiers. Put your jokes outside the license section.

viraptor 13y ago
Another reason not to use it would be pre-approved licences in corporations. I can use software released under many popular free licenses without issues. But something like this one forces a roundtrip through the legal department which takes days / weeks. If you want your software to be business/corporate friendly, make sure you're using something popular (and preferably not mentioning patents or special linking clauses).
SamHocevar 13y ago
(disclaimer: I wrote WTFPL v2) I fart on your recommendation of the CC0. Your first “reason” is totally bogus. There is no need to cover cases where it’s not possible to place stuff in the public domain, because there is no need to place stuff in the public domain. That’s a fabrication of the CC0 license and one of the reasons why the OSI does not recommend it. A license shouldn’t even mention public domain since it’s not a widely accepted concept. Your second “reason” sounds like a matter of taste to me, especially since the CC0 goes to great lengths defining new terms such as “Commons” and “Affirmer”. If there’s a joke here, it’s the CC0, in needing more than a thousand words to basically say “do what the fuck you want”. Moreover, here is a quote from the OSI about the CC0: “the Committee felt that approving such a license would set a dangerous precedent, and possibly even weaken patent infringement defenses available to users of software released under CC0”. It’s also worth noting that the WTFPL predates the CC0 by nine years. Nine years to fill a non-existing void, and they couldn’t even do it properly.

octatone2 13y ago

This may be nitpicking, but it seems rather restrictive to force renaming of the license in the case of its modification. That is not very "do what the fuck you want to" ...

dpcan 13y ago

So, if I can just do what the Fuck I want to, then can I download your code and then re-license it as proprietary and charge royalties to everyone else who is just doing what the fuck they want to with it? I mean - I'm doing what the fuck I want to soooooo...... This is probably a stretch or something, but really, my point is that this license is so incredibly open to interpretation that I get worried about using code licensed with it every time.

steveklabnik 13y ago
With anyone who uses your re-licensed version, yes. Not the people who aren't.
ricardobeat 13y ago
Of course you can. Companies use MIT/BSD/Apache/etc licensed work in proprietary systems all the time, that's what they are for. You're better off using one of those since they leave no room for confusion.

otikik 13y ago

I use MIT for this. Already well known, stablished, and has the same effect. It is also less offensive to people who get offended by words. That can be an advantage or a detriment; it depends on you.

sergiotapia 13y ago
Exactly, the MIT license is my favorite out of all of theme. Apache, BSD, CC, etc - needlessly complicated and full of lawyer-lingo. MIT speaks to me and my priorities.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dnautics 13y ago

I tend to do things with less legalism, with the copyheart (which is not a licence) http://copyheart.org/ http://copyheart.org/

mjg59 13y ago
Am I allowed to modify copyhearted material? Distribute modified versions? Perform them? Incorporate them into works that are copyrighted?
- dnautics 13y ago
  why are you asking for permission? You've already lost. http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/23/allowed/ http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/23/allowed/
rwmj 13y ago
So no one can safely use your code, and you can be sued because you don't disclaim liability properly. Great idea!
- dnautics 13y ago
  why should I have to 'disclaim liability'? Because our litigious society would like to take advantage me and sue my pants off for no real reason? Then the flaw is not in my code, is it?
  - janardanyri 13y ago
    Because those few lines of boilerplate you would have to add exist in order to make explicit your stance on issues you probably don't even know exist, and their inclusion would come at basically zero cost. Programmers of all people should appreciate that the "plain English" explanation of something is often sorely lacking in comparison to a full and complete implementation.
    - dnautics 13y ago

pygy_ 13y ago

See also it romantic counterpart: https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License https://github.com/pygy/The-Romantic-WTF-Public-License /shameless plug

hkmurakami 13y ago

wow didn't know this was fsf approved. the in-your-face-ness of the name makes it a great tool for talking about copyright with someone and making a point.