'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.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733477" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733477</a><p>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.
Can we please just be mature about the realities of licensing? It's serious business.<p>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).<p>It's not hard to copy a MIT or Apache license file into your repositories and push it.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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 <i>read</i> 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.<p>(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.)
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.<p>So, it'd be nice, I think, if we could create a <i>mapping</i> 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 <i>pick</i> a license based on intent (instead of reading legalese), and have it <i>map</i> to a license with full legal power.<p>--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.
I once worked on a project with 10 years of legacy code that entered into a partnership with IBM.<p>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)<p>I would love to see how the lawyers respond to code under the "Do I Look Like I Give A Shit" license.<p>Anyway, for people in this thread pleading to take these things more seriously, it's because of real-life scenarios like I just described.<p>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.<p>More likely is that experienced management will prohibit developers from using the code in the first place.
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.