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by _ph_ 3005 days ago
I guess this is a case where the intent of the license might be obvious, but the legal details of the license not worked out well enough. I really don't understand why people, who basically want to open their sources to everyone, don't just take one of the more established licenses for that purpose, like MIT/BSD.
2 comments
Doctor_Fegg 3005 days ago
Because it's an intentional thumbing-of-nose at licence wankery. WTFPL is a statement that "do what you want and stop being so precious about it".
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_ph_ 3005 days ago
Proper licensing of software is a technical requirement, if you want your software to be used. The technicalities of the law might be unneccessary complex, bizarre even in some cases, but thats how the law is. We programmers are not goint to change that. So, if you really don't care, just take the MIT license, which is about the simplest of the widely used licenses. With that license, anyone interested has a clear base to use your software. Unless of course, you don't intend to share your software for real in the first place.
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burntsushi 3005 days ago
Your original comment said you "didn't understand," not that you "didn't agree." The former prompts a very different answer than the latter, but you're acting as if you said the latter.

To understand it, all you need to do is understand that some folks take actions based on ideological beliefs, often to the exclusion of pragmatism, knowingly or not.

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_ph_ 3004 days ago
No, it doesn't. I really do not understand why one thinks this is a good idea. Yes, people are free in their beliefs and expression. But if they try to do this with a nonstandard license, it only means, that the software is effectively not published as open source.

The technicalities of the law are very complicated. Tiny mistakes can render a license unusable or just invalid. So, the best advice I can give any author is to stick to one of the well-known license, as this makes it very likely that the software can be used by others.

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burntsushi 3004 days ago
> I really do not understand why one thinks this is a good idea.

You really don't understand that sometimes people act idealistically, often to the exclusion of pragmatism? What don't you understand about it?

Please consider that not everyone has the same life priorities as you.

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TheCoelacanth 3004 days ago
WTFPL is essentially an ideological stance against the concept of intellectually property. To use the software you have to partially reject the importance of license compliance.
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