In the world of software, licenses are a big deal. There’s the pure legal aspect, there’s the liability aspect, there’s protection for property, and then there’s a lot of philosophy that goes into licenses.
For instance, consider the Open Source licenses. They are there for legal purposes, but also to promote a specific philosophy about how source code should be treated.
Well, in their latest attention-whoring effort, PETA has created a flavor of an open source license. I’m not going to link to it to give them any more attention than this post getting indexed by Google and Bing will give it. But the idea is they took a BSD-style license as a foundation then added a clause that use of the software cannot be used to harm humans or animals. Because of that, the license actually doesn’t satisfy the definition of an open license, because an open license strives to minimize restrictions and promote openness — this license discriminates against that, but PETA openly acknowledges that (because their point isn’t openness, it’s driving home their narrow viewpoint).
So as a wonderful alternative, we have the WTFPL — Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.
Reproduced here in its entirety:
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
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.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
Stuff From Hsoi 