The "Do I Look Like I Give A Shit" Public Licence

http://blog.samuellevy.com/post/46-do-i-look-like-i-give-a-shit-public-licence.html

by samuellevy • 13 years ago

38 41 13 years ago

blog.samuellevy.com

themodelplumber• 13 years ago

Now draw a Venn diagram of the people who read the license vs. the people who contact this developer for support

tekromancr• 13 years ago

And in the convergence space is where the trolls live.

stfp• 13 years ago

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

lightyrs• 13 years ago

He addresses this in his post.

samuellevy2• 13 years ago

Yes, it's similar to the WTFPL, but only slightly more restrictive, in that it tells the user to leave the author alone.

derefr• 13 years ago

You know, it occurs to me--people like to have "LICENSEs" like these, even though they're not legally binding (and in fact tend to break integration legally-speaking), because they don't like legalese and don't want to try reading through legalese to pick the legalese most representative of their desires.

So, it'd be nice, I think, if we could create a mapping between these sort of "intention-based licenses" and the more legally-strict "implementation-rule-based licenses." Like, to say, "code under the Do I Look Like I Give A Shit License is, in practice, MIT-licensed" or something like that. And then people can pick a license based on intent (instead of reading legalese), and have it map to a license with full legal power.

--or, cut out a step, and just give all the current legally-enforcable licenses nice, human-friendly abstracts, for things like the GitHub LICENSE chooser to display.

josephlord• 13 years ago

Why do you think this wouldn't be binding?

67726e• 13 years ago

GitHub recently created a little site for this purpose. It's not exactly all encompassing, but it covers the three major licenses: https://github.com/blog/1530-choosing-an-open-source-license

i386• 13 years ago

Can we please just be mature about the realities of licensing? It's serious business.

In my experience the the worst licenses to deal with are the ones that lawyers have not had a hand in specifying the language used (With the exception of anything that's been written by someone on retainer at Oracle).

It's not hard to copy a MIT or Apache license file into your repositories and push it.

gojomo8• 13 years ago

Some people's disgust with the giant castles of complexity created by licensing is "serious business", too.

glhaynes• 13 years ago

I'd be sympathetic if there weren't already so many good licenses to choose from that express so many of the configurations that people might want. If you don't like MIT, BSD, (L)GPL, Apache, Creative Commons, public domain, ... what is it you need? Apparently it's something complex.

tptacek4• 13 years ago

"Giant castles of complexity"? If you don't give a shit, just MIT license, or use the Public Domain Unlicense.

conroy• 13 years ago

The MIT license is 167 words, hardly a "giant castle of complexity"

  $ cat mit.txt | wc 
     19     167    1065
  $ cat bsd.txt | wc
     10     219    1479
  $ cat CC0.txt | wc
     29     978    6384

greenyoda2• 13 years ago

Having a license like this could make your software unusable for companies who need to get their licenses vetted by lawyers because they (and their customers) are afraid of being sued for copyright infringement. Do your users a favor by using one of the standard licenses (like the MIT License) that have better-crafted legal language.

As far as I remember, all of the major free software licenses disclaim any obligation to maintain the software, disclaim that the software is fit for any specific task and state that the user uses it at their own risk.

gojomo8• 13 years ago

Scaring away those companies might be a plus, especially in this case.

viraptor• 13 years ago

It's not that simple unfortunately. Here's an example of what could happen: A is under the shit licence, B depends on A, lots of people use B. Among those people is a big corporation, which needs their licences verified and they decide the shit licence is not acceptable. They'll talk to B about making A optional, replacing it, of will create an internal fork of it. If there's a business case for it, it will happen. And no one else gains anything from those solutions.

If you use a known licence at least there's a chance that those companies will at some point contribute back instead of sitting on their internal patches.

I'm in that situation now with a couple of projects, but I have to patch them locally only. I will not spend days with legal to approve a licence, sign a contributor agreement, or some other form of ownership transfer. Both the project and its users lose that way.

plorkyeran• 13 years ago

Lawyers contacting you to ask if you're willing to relicense would be an amusing way for it to backfire, though.

samuellevy2• 13 years ago

It's pretty much an "I abandoned this software" licence, so anyone who actually uses it probably doesn't care if potential users can't use it.

greenyoda2• 13 years ago

If the author doesn't care whether people can use his software, he may be hurting his reputation and credibility by keeping the software publicly available. Potential users who see other software written by him could remember what his attitude toward his previous software was and avoid anything he's associated with in the future. And potential employers who find this code on the web might also be unimpressed with it.

tptacek4• 13 years ago

'DannyBee, who is an attorney who IIRC specializes in exactly this subject, has suggested that these funny, funny jokes could plausibly come at the expense of your house, probably many years after you forgot you made the joke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733477

Long story short, no matter how hilarious and concise your license is, you probably want to disclaim warranty, and in the form everyone else uses.

gojomo8• 13 years ago

No progress comes without risk.

There's plenty of untested FUD, well exemplified by your linked comment, about how someday somehow someone might screw you, if you don't follow all the right lawyerly-approved licensing incantations. If someone wants to minimize risk and fuss, they should surely follow the lawyer-recommended course.

But if they've got other goals, such as testing whether the FUD is true, and maybe eventually getting the legal precedents established that such lawyerly boilerplate isn't necessary for free uncompensated sharing of code, then they might follow another course. That other course might sometimes infuriate potential code-reusers, and appear reckless to experts about the traditional order. But once aware of the risks, it's the licensor's own chance to take.

Of course, YMMV, IANAL, etc.

(If there is any case of an open-source author being sued in a manner where simply having attached the right license boilerplate would have saved them, that would make an excellent front-page HN story.)

jsmeaton2• 13 years ago

Yep. The whole system seems backwards.

"This software is safe for use in a nuclear reactor". Not "this software, that I made in highschool for the lulz, is not safe to be used in a nuclear reactor".

Software should come with guarantees if guarantees are needed. It should not come with an exhaustive list of non-guarantees.

tptacek4• 13 years ago

Are you qualified to assess the linked comment as "FUD"? If so, how?

belorn• 13 years ago

Disclaimers are one of those legal magic incantations, which origin and purpose is lost on almost everyone except historians.

To put it all into perspective, the origin is as old as 1854, and was from a legal case around a delayed mill shaft. That leading English contract law case was many years later written into the Uniform Commercial Code. It specifies the need for disclaimer, and specifies that any disclaimers must be "conspicuous", which in turn is defined as: A term of clause is conspicuous when it is so written that a reasonable person against whom it is to operate ought to have noticed it. [...] Whether a term or clause is “conspicuous” or not is for decision by the court. The document gives as an example that a printed heading in capitals is conspicuous, though any text that is larger or in a contrasting type or color will work.

So what it boils down to is this: If you sell something and thus perform a commercial transactions, you can become liable, except if the contract between the customer and seller conspicuously says otherwise.

A software license is not a contract, and most people don't sell the software if they put it under a permissive license. I'm not a lawyer, but the liability of giving away software should be minimal, if any at all.

anotherhue4• 13 years ago

I read this, and the WTFPL as backlash against the concept of licensing itself. That is, if you want to hack code and 'put it out there' you may not want to deal with IP issues. I bounce back and forth between feeling that the harsh language is crass and unhelpful versus an appropriate and sane reaction to the legal mess that is IP.

tjaerv• 13 years ago

Another such backlash is the Unlicense: http://unlicense.org/

anotherhue4• 13 years ago

I've been using CC0, but that one looks like a better fit for software. Thanks.

everettForth• 13 years ago

I once worked on a project with 10 years of legacy code that entered into a partnership with IBM.

We were required to audit every line of code used in the project, and state whether we owned the code, or if the code was open source, what license was used. (The bottom line is that IBM's lawyers were afraid we might be using GPL code)

I would love to see how the lawyers respond to code under the "Do I Look Like I Give A Shit" license.

Anyway, for people in this thread pleading to take these things more seriously, it's because of real-life scenarios like I just described.

This is the kind of thing that could hold up a Multi-Million Dollar business deal for weeks while the lawyers figure out what to do about using code with this license.

More likely is that experienced management will prohibit developers from using the code in the first place.

mechanical_fish• 13 years ago

Open-source licenses aren't some kind of restraint that lawyers use to chain down free software. They're the carefully-crafted wings that enable a free-software ecosystem to fly at all.

Without the licenses free software doesn't get more free. It just dies. Everybody runs away from it. Copyright law is clear: It belongs to the original author, and without a clear transfer of rights, nobody dares to reuse it except in secret. It's technically risky even to read it, lest you establish evidence that will later be used against you in a copyright suit. And it's risky to offer the original author a patch without an explicit disclaimer of warranty - after all, the author owns and controls the code, and the fact that the codebase looked like comedy on Tuesday doesn't mean it won't be part of a nuclear power plant by Friday night.

(Of course, when the lawsuit happens you'll probably be able to argue that the use of your patch in a nuclear power plant wasn't authorized. But that argument may have to be made to a jury, by a lawyer that is costing you a lot of money.)

The "Do I Look Like I Give A Shit" Public Licence

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