[sophacles]

I'll go ahead and feed the troll: please back up your statement that the license won't hold up in court. The site you link to has an entry for the "do what the fuck you want license v2" and there is literally no warning, and the only restriction mentioned is that a change to the license text requires a change to the license name.

So again: exactly what is the problem (beyond hand-wavy unevidenced claims about judges)?

[jnbiche]

Can we please refrain from calling people trying to make a bona fide argument as "trolls"? You may disagree -- that's fine. But can we please keep the discussion focused on the issues and not the person making the argument?

I agree with Alupis that WTF is an unfortunate license choice for many projects, since it introduces a lot of legal uncertainty. But I also agree with most commenters in this thread that for this particular project, it doesn't matter. Cool though it is, no one is going to use this code in a commercial project, or as the basis for another OS project.

So it really doesn't matter in this case.

On the other hand, if someone writes a TCP stack in ARM assembly and licenses it under WTF with the intention of letting other people use it in their projects, there's a potential problem. It's not just corporations who will avoid a non-standard license, it's many established open source projects as well (for the same reason: legal uncertainty).

[Alupis]

There are several. And no, just because a license appears on the site I linked to does not make it "solid".

* The codebase in question neglected to include the "No Warranty" clause, which implicitly means his code is fit for use. So, if I run it on my machine and my machine crashes, he is liable.

* Just because a license has yet to be challenged, does not make it solid. That would be rather dangerous in a corporate environment.

* This license does not forbid me from re-assigning copyright to myself, then pursuing the original author.

As I said before, licensing is serious business. There is a reason most licenses are pretty long, even the "do what you want" licensing like MIT or BSD.

[xj9]

How often are you going to use an IRC bot written in BrainFuck in a corporate environment?

[Alupis]

I was more speaking about the license in general, not the specific codebase example.

[xj9]

The entire situation is context sensitive. Hobby projects with no practical value don't need serious licensing because they aren't serious projects. Things that other people might actually use are a different story, one that the author of the codebase in mention seems to be aware of.