[Alupis]

What stops me from re-licencing under my company's proprietary license, then suing the original author for copyright? (It appears this "license" allows implicit re-assignment of copyright).

Not to mention, this "license" was not written by a lawyer, but rather a software developer. I'm no lawyer, and I'm confident any license I can make up would be shredded by real lawyers.

Furthermore -- the codebase in question above, does not include the optional "No Warranty" clause, which means his software implicitly must be fit for use... and if it breaks something, he can be held liable.

While I agree with the spirit and intent of this license, it really isn't a real license and is easily mis-used by even those who do wish to treat it as real.

So, this license appears to be really a joke-license... not a serious one... and I still maintain the codebase's author should pick a real license if the intentions are to allow universal use.

[clarry]

Relicensing is a weird term and easily leads to confusion. I guess you can write your own terms and distribute copies under these new terms. But you cannot revoke the rights the original license has granted to people who have received the work under that license. Nor can you revoke the original author's exclusive rights. The license text (which is about the copying and performing of the covered work) does not grant you such powers.

[belorn]

A license is a permission granted by the author, and an extension of the authors wishes.

This is why relicensing as a term indeed leads to confusion. People think the license is inherently a part of the work, and thus can be as readily changed as the software source itself. It is however not part of the work, but part of the author. If you want to change the license, you need to get the author to change his mind.

Some licenses allow people to add new licenses on-top of existing licenses. That is not re-licensing, but simply the addition of more requirements. If you remove the original license, you loose the permission needed to use/copy the work created by the original author.

[clarry]

Thanks for expressing it so clearly. I'll quote you when the time comes.

The SFLC had a chance to set this straight in the aftermath of the inflammatory 2007 episode around the Atheros driver. Instead they dodged the entire relicensing question and released a set of guidelines which focus on where and how to preserve the copyright notice, and that rather seems to only have reinforced the idea that the permissive BSD style licenses are nothing more than a decorative text you must lug around. So we still have a huge number of people who think they can do anything (e.g. "relicense") as long as the decoration is kept in place. It really is a shame.

[cyorir]

With respect to relicensing, I assume that depends on a country's specific copyright laws. Ordinarily this license is as close to the public domain as you can be while still still having a license. So the protections against re-licensing are similar to protections for works placed in the public domain. For example you can't relicense Bach's works and then sue people for playing those works. So the burden is on the relicensor to show that their license supercedes the WTFPL. Unfortunately, the specifics of how this burden is handled in a court as well as treatment of the public domain in general are per-country (and sometimes subject to international agreements). Likewise with warranty, different countries will have different treatments.

What I don't quite get is why at this point you wouldn't simply place a work into the public domain or use creative commons or whatever. Maybe that is because different countries have different interpretations of "public domain."

[nknighthb]

> It appears this "license" allows implicit re-assignment of copyright

US copyright law does not recognize implicit transfers of copyright. And we're unusually liberal in what can and cannot be done with copyright. And I don't believe for a moment that any judge in any country would recognize WTFPL as providing for any such thing in the first place.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/204

[AlyssaRowan]

The author can just do what the fuck he wants to, too.

[kjs3]

I bet you're a real joy at parties.