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by hermitdev 530 days ago
It's not that they don't understand; it's that it causes more work for the lawyers, because someone has to review the license if it's not one of the standard boilerplate acceptable licenses.

I once had to go to lawyers to get a license approved on a lib that went something along the lines of "this work is in the public domain; do whatever the fuck you want with it, just don't come crawling to me for help". I'm paraphrasing from ~20-year-old memories here, but I do distinctly remember the profanity. It elicited a chuckle from the lawyer and something along the lines of "I wish all of these were this simple".
3 comments
wat10000 530 days ago
JSLint had a standard open source license with an addition that said “The Software should be used for Good, not Evil.”

IBM wanted to use it but their lawyers balked at the added restriction. They wrote to the author to see if it could be removed. The author wrote back with, “I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.”

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8organicbits 530 days ago
If you're doing this sort of license analysis, try a license detector I built. It tries to guess which license was used and diff any changes. Lots of licenses are small changes from others, so it usually makes multiple guesses.

https://alexsci.com/which-license/

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emmelaich 530 days ago
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

"DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE"

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