Weird software licenses you may have not tried yet

6 Jan 2020

Rant 

So, you've just made your first software project and are wondering how to license it. Well, here's a quick guide to some options you may want to (not) take.

Traditionally there are approximately 4 different paths for licensing:

1. GPL-ish (GPL 2/3/2+; AGPL; LGPL)
2. BSD-ish (4-clause, 3-clause, MIT, Apache)
3. Whatever your community uses (e.g. Artistic license for Perl; EPL for many Clojure projects; Dual MIT/Apache 2.0 for a lot of Rust; etc)
4. "We don't do none of that hippy shit, just give us all your money and we'll call it even" proprietary licensing.

There's also the path less trodden, path number 5, and that's the ones I want to talk about today. They come in many flavours including:

• There's the simple e.g. WTFPL aka Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License
• The hopeful e.g. DBAD aka "Dont Be a Dick" Public License
• The thirsty e.g. Beerware "If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return"
• The moral e.g. JSON license with it's "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" clause (completely lacking a definition for either term incidentally)
• The necromantic e.g. D&R (Death and Repudiation) License which states "This software may not be used directly by any living being" (thankfully the software in question is dual-licensed with the BSD license)
• The medical e.g. The Vaccine license "The Vaccine License is a software license that requires that users vaccinate their children, and themselves"
• The vegan e.g. the old Ext JS license "You agree you are not producing any products, and where applicable its ingredients, which involve the use of any animal product, by-product or derivative."
• And of course, those that are not licenses. SQLite has a blessing rather than license text for example.

You could pick one of those. I can't stop you. But for the sake of everyone's sanity, don't add to the long list of existing licenses and pick one of the options 1-3 at the top of this, because otherwise you've just made life much harder for anyone wanting to use your software, and that's no fun for anyone.

Previously: How to get a 10x developer Next: munger: Scan-to-cloud for local scanners

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