[samhw]

> They should change, not me.

OK, they should change. Great. They won't, though, so your code won't be usable by them. If that's not a problem, then your code was never really relevant to this discussion. If that is a problem, then shoulds and woulds ain't gonna help.

[hsn915]

The purpose of freely distributing code is not to be useful to corporations. It's to foster a spirit of sharing with the community.

If I put something up for free, it's because I want other programmers to be able to freely use it. I don't care if a big corporation with expensive lawyers likes the way the license is worded.

[Brian_K_White]

But if your license is stupid, then other programmers can not use it. Congratulations.

There is really no excuse for not at some point in your entire programming life, taking the time to go over these things, figure out what they end up meaning in real life, and thereafter knowing which ones actually do represent your wishes and intents. Picking one whos only property is it's so short it doesn't actually do anything hardly counts.

It doesn't really matter how big and complicated a license is any more than how big and complicated a compiled executable is or all the parts in a car. What matters is does it do the job that needs doing. All else being equal, smaller and more elegant is better as a direction or principle of course, but the reason we even have writing is to assemble work into a reusable package, so that time-consuming work like writing a book only has to be done once, and then everyone else gets to use the big complicated work many times over without having to re-create it each time.

It's an efficiency and a power amplifier to be able to pack up a bunch of complicated things into a writing and then treat the writing as a single simple thing.

You happly use gcc (or your car, or whatever) many times every day. You did the work one time to figure out that the tool you need is gcc, and after that, all you mentally think about is just "gcc" not the thousands of lines of code or the millions of machine instructions that make it up every time you use it. If I write a new "The Un-cc" that only has about 8 lines of code and is oh so refreshingly simple to understand, one would hope that you would not use it.

The point of the established and thorough licenses is exactly to do a whole lot of hard work once and let everyone else reuse it countless times.

The point of a stupid new license that pointedly and intentionally does not do any of that hard work is there is no point at all to it. It's just a stupid idea, and as such, it's probably no great loss that other people can not use code from an author who chose such a stupid license.