WTFPL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_What_The_Fuck_You_Want_To_Public_License

by superberliner • 16 years ago

64 34 16 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

kevingadd• 16 years ago

I find it funny that this apparently meets the Wikipedia notability standards.

Anyway, I always found it strange that anyone would choose to use this license. The concept behind it is great, but why include unnecessary profanity in the license terms? It seems like it would only make it more difficult to defend the validity of the license and any works released under the license.

scdlbx• 16 years ago

What would you need to defend?

eru4• 16 years ago

Scenario: Alice writes a program, puts it under that licence, Bob uses the program, Alice dies and her heir Eve wants to get money from Bob for using the software. Eve tries to get a court to declare the licence invalid, so that Bob has to re-licence the program under new conditions or stop using it.

TallGuyShort2• 16 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, the GPL has had to be defended in court several times. It's a situation where someone tries to charge money for a product, but a GPL'd source code was used in the product. That particular situation doesn't apply to this license however, since you can, apparently, do whatever you want.

lmkg• 16 years ago

It seems to me that you would use this license if you specifically intend to spit in the eye of copyright laws in general. The use of this license burns quite a few bridges even without the profanity, but the profanity makes it a political statement in addition to a legal document.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

It's notable because there's a reasonable amount of software released under it, including, for example, some software in Debian's repositories.

guelo2• 16 years ago

I always thought this license was misnamed since it does have one restriction:

  "and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed."

kqr2• 16 years ago

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed.

Doesn't that just apply to the license document -- not the software itself?

guelo2• 16 years ago

Oh, you're right.

3dFlatLander• 16 years ago

Is there any legal difference between using this license and releasing something under public domain?

almost• 16 years ago

In some countries there isn't a legal concept of public domain. I don't know much more than that but I think Germany may be one of them.

vog• 16 years ago

Yes and no.

Here in Germany (and other countries) we do have a public domain ("gemeinfrei", "gemeinfreie Werke"), but it contains only works whose authors died at least 70 years ago. It is impossible for a living person to actively put their work into the public domain.

However, this is not as bureaucratic as it may sound. You can still sign off any exploitation rights ("Verwertungsrechte")! But there are other rights you cannot sign off, the author's moral rights ("Urheberpersönlichkeitsrechte").

In general, there are two flavours of copyright law in the world:

1) The copyright which centers around the act of copying or doing other things with the creative work. This is found in the USA and Great Britain.

2) The author's rights ("Urheberrecht", "droit d'auteur") which centers around the creators. This is found in Germany and France.

tedunangst2• 16 years ago

One problem with the licence is that the text primarily seems to concern itself. Compare MIT licence "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software" or public domain "This ... is public domain." which explicitly tell you what is licensed.

And when you find yourself in court being sued by the original author who says "Obviously, that licence was a joke, I never meant it", good luck....

petercooper• 16 years ago

Do some Googling, but there can be liability issues with public domain if your work causes damage. There have been some significant discussions about it over the last year in terms of public domain vs GPL and BSD licenses.

pygy_• 16 years ago

See also : The Romantic WTF Public License

http://danslalune.posterous.com/the-romantic-wtf-public-lice...

It's even more free than the original since the license is released under itself. Released on Valentine's day by yours truly :-)

CoreDumpling• 16 years ago

I would say that the postscript of that license is the one thing that I consider missing from the original WTFPL. If I'm giving away my software for free without restrictions, I sure as hell don't want to get sued over it.

andrewljohnson• 16 years ago

I released some code under a similar license, but I just made it up on the spot: http://trailbehind.com/comment_widget/

"CommentWidget isn't released under a particular open source license. You can do whatever you like with the code, anything at all."

eru4• 16 years ago

Isn't this a particular license in itself?

eli2• 16 years ago

I would worry that this is not actually legally binding.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

Why would it not be?

eli2• 16 years ago

If your license won't hold up in court, then you might as well not bother with one. You really can't be cavalier about the langauge in your contracts.

Take the recent landmark case of Jacobsen v. Katzer -- Jacobsen nearly lost because he was using a slightly oddball open source license (the Artistic License) that was not written by a lawyer, had some ambiguous passages, and didn't quite say what he intended.

Sure, it's less of an issue with an extremely permissive license like this one, but let's imagine you aren't around any more and some company wants to use your code... but they can't because their legal department doesn't trust the license.

bravura• 16 years ago

I provide support for my code under a "pay it forward" license. i.e. if I provide support to you and help you get my code running, then I expect you in turn to invest the time to clearly document what I showed you. This is a principle of least effort, insofar as I will provide support assuming I won't need to duplicate my work for the next guy. It also means I don't need to needlessly document things that people don't care about. This is similar to lazy coding: "throw an exception if this tricky corner-case pops up, and only if this exception trips will I go through the effort to think through correct behavior for this corner case".

http://thisscientificmethod.com/2010/02/28/this-is-an-experi...

natep• 16 years ago

I like this idea, but why do you link to a blog comment of yours that says exactly the same thing?

cdibona2• 16 years ago

These kinds of licenses are cute, but you shouldn't use one as it just makes life harder on those that might adopt and patch back into your software. Additionally, in this case, the lack of a disclaimer of warranty in this particular cute license is ill advised.

aeosynth• 16 years ago

http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ Why is there no “no warranty” clause?

The WTFPL is an all-purpose license and does not cover only computer programs; it can be used for artwork, documentation and so on. As such, it only covers copying, distribution and modification. If you want to add a no warranty clause for a program, you may use the following wording in your source code:

  /* This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to
 * the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it
 * and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want
 * To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See
 * http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING for more details. */

How does this make life harder for hackers? Explicit permission is given to do whatever the fuck [you] want to, which includes hacking.

cdibona2• 16 years ago

Watch: I choose to ignore the warranty clause per clause 0. Also, since that clause exists, I can choose to apply it to other code I combine it with (unlikely, but its a dumb license that way)

Past that, I'm not convinced that due to clause 0 that it can be combined with other code, and I am of the opinion that more licenses are not good for open source development in general.

A responsible coder, given the desire in the wtfpl, would adopt a richard hipp style posture, or choose mit,bsd or apache.

WTFPL

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