[robobro]

This isn't exactly news...

pulls out soap box The WTFPL is great, though. It's a shame not more people use it. It seems to me that for truly free speech, restrictive licenses need to be abandoned, even if it's at the sake of a content donor's money (traditional copyright) or fame (copyright and copyleft). There are a lot of good arguments for the copyfree movement, in general. If we see freedom as being the absence of limitations, licenses like the WTFPL can really be considered the most free, and general arguments for free software can be applied appropriately.

And, as we've seen with the advent of unauthorized content distribution networks, people will treat work of merit as if it's licensed WTFPL anyway, whether the author/s like/s it or not. Rejecting confusing license terms makes it easier for projects to thrive in the open source community as well. It really confounds me how RMS can reject DRM but be so supportive of his own freedom-limiting psychological DRM of sorts.

Here's a list -- http://copyfree.org/licenses/ -- of these sorts of licenses, and a good, slightly more serious introduction to the public domain/copyfree/WTFPL movement in general, for those interested.

[p4bl0]

> It really confounds me how RMS can reject DRM but be so supportive of his own freedom-limiting psychological DRM of sorts.

I think you are unfair by calling copyleft licenses "DRM of sorts". Copyleft licenses voluntarily make a compromise: they chose to lessen the freedom of individuals to grow the freedom of the group/community. You may or may not agree with that, but you have to recognize that such trade-offs are necessary to organize a society. A clear example is the law which forbid one to kill someone else: at the individual level, they deprive you of the right to kill people, but at the same time they increase the freedom of the society as a whole. DRM are not the same: at no points they benefit to the people who are restricted by them.

I would call copyfree licences more permissives and copyleft licences more restrictives. But I would not call copyfree licences more free than copyleft licences. I would do the opposite. Maybe this says that I value the freedom of the society more than the freedom of individuals, because I do not believe at all that the freedom of the society is the mere sum of the freedom of the individuals who compose it.

[mikegerwitz]

It is not appropriate to compare DRM---a concept that exists to prevent studying and sharing---with a movement designed to ensure exactly that.

See <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html>.

Snippet from <http://mikegerwitz.com/2013/08/FreeBSD-Clang-and-GCC-Copylef...:

----

Copyleft is important[7] because it ensures that all users will forever have the four fundamental freedoms associated with Free Software[6]. The GPL incorporates copyleft; BSD licenses do not. Consider why this is a problem: Imagine some software Foo licensed under the Modified BSD license[10]. Foo is free software; it is licensed under a free software license (Modified BSD).[5] Now consider that someone makes a fork—a derivative—of Foo, which we will call “Foobar”. Since the Modified BSD license is not copyleft[10], the author of Foobar decides that he or she does not wish to release its source code; this is perfectly compliant with the Modified BSD license, as it does not require that source code be distributed with a binary (it only requires—via its second clause[10]—that the copyright notice, list of conditions and disclaimer be provided).

The author has just taken Foo and made it proprietary.

The FreeBSD community is okay with this; the free software community is not[4]. There is a distinction between these two parties: When critics of copyleft state that they believe the GPL is “less free” than more permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses, they are taking into consideration the freedoms of developers and distributors; the GPL, on the other hand, explicirly restricts these parties' rights in order to protect the users because those parties are precisely those that seek to restrict the users' freedoms; we cannot provide such freedoms to developers and distributors without sacrificing the rights of the vulnerable users who generally do not have the skills to protect themselves from being taken advantage of.[13] Free software advocates have exclusive, unwaivering loyalty to users.

[emaste]

> The author has just taken Foo and made it proprietary.

No, they have made Foobar, a proprietary derivative of Foo. This does not change the license of Foo or cause it to cease to exist.

[jeremysmyth]

people will treat work of merit as if it's licensed WTFPL anyway

People will punch others in the face outside bars on Friday nights too, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable, even if it's hard to prosecute universally.

Some content creators (OK, let's be honest: an awful lot of content creators) would rather their work isn't used by the other side's political party, or by XYZ bigoted group, or by Megacorp in their advertising campaign. If you don't want to release all rights to a creative work, you don't have to. There are legal protections available to content creators right now, so there is still a justifiable benefit in retaining some rights, regardless of any arguments about licence-ignoring personal use and interpersonal distribution.

[k__]

Is is possible to release software with a licence, which prohibits it's use for religious entities?

[andrewaylett]

Of course -- you can release software with a license that requires the recipient to abstain from wearing pink shirts if you want[0].

That license would be non-FSF-Free and wouldn't meet the OSI definition of Open Source, though, as both groups see the benefit of allowing anyone to use the software. The OSI lists the criteria[1] as "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups" and "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor".

Therefore, while possible, it might not be particularly useful to do that. You also need to consider the implications of combining your software with software released under a differently-permissive license -- you could quickly get into a position where your software can't be distributed at all without violating at least one of the licenses that apply.

Also note that I Am Not A Lawyer and I'm sure there's a jurisdiction somewhere which would read your license in a different way to that which is intended, or would strike out parts of it altogether, ending up with either a more permissive or a less permissive license than you'd intended.

[0]: I am currently wearing a pink shirt. Please don't sue me. [1]: http://opensource.org/osd

[amirmc]

> "It's a shame not more people use it."

Putting aside the legal issues, I am not ever going to introduce unnecessary expletives if I want people to take my work seriously/professionally. If I do see a license like this I'll automatically assume that the author isn't taking that particular code seriously and treat it accordingly (ie may use personally but never professionally).

[RossM]

I've wondered before - what's the difference between WTFPL and just releasing something into the public domain? The name-change bit seems to relate to the license itself, rather than the licensed work.

[dagw]

The problem is that there is no such thing as a universally agreed upon concept of public domain. If you actually care about licensing and want your project to globally and legally be in something like the public domain, in the US sense, then you're going to have to use something like the creative commons CC0 license.

Of course if you don't really care all that much about the details of international copyright law and just think it's cool to swear on the internet then the WTFPL will be fine.

[rakoo]

The thing is, there is no universal notion of public domain. For instance, you could say that a work in the public domain belongs to no-one and/or everyone... but in France (and, as I juste learned, in the rest of Europe as well [0]) there is this thing that says that the creator of a work will always have paternity on it, forever.

I think most people have the same notion though, but as you know law is not just about notions, it's about hardcoding what's ok and what's not. This is actually what the CC0 tries to "solve": if there is no notion of public domain in the country you live in, then you apply the terms of the license, which happen to be what "public domain" would be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#In_Europe

[chimeracoder]

I think you're getting your terms confused.

> If we see freedom as being the absence of limitations, licenses like the WTFPL can really be considered the most free, and general arguments for free software can be applied appropriately.

"Free", as defined by the FSF (and as used by those in the free software world), is a binary classification. There are four freedoms that free software must respect: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

If a license software respects all of those freedoms, it is a free license. Otherwise, it is non-free.

Note that the ability to apply additional restrictions to existing software is not one of the four freedoms.

> It really confounds me how RMS can reject DRM but be so supportive of his own freedom-limiting psychological DRM of sorts.

I assume you're referring to the GPL. Understand that the GPL is meant to be a hack of the system: it's a software license (copyright) written by a group who fundamentally believes that copyright to software (as it is currently used) should not exist[0].

The GPL is a twist of copyright law to force it to do the exact opposite of what it was intended to do: instead of restricting others' freedoms, it preserves them.

[0] The FSF does not actively oppose software copyright because doing so would harm the GPL (and therefore harm free software), but the origins of the free software movement are deeply tied to the question of whether or not software should be copyrightable at all - not so long ago, this was not an obvious question.

And yes, for those who are wondering, it is certainly possible to have free software in a world in which software is not eligible for copyright protections. The GPL is meant as a hack around the current system, as we have it now.